Inheritance
by Cuofeng
Summary: After the fall of Phaaze and the end of the X-plague the galaxy was at peace. But as Samus wandered out at the edges of space, whispers came to her of something new: an ancient discovery, a Space Pirate force bearing down on a Federation outpost, and a fight brewing in the bones of the silent Chozo empire.
1. Sulphur and Ice

...

An acidic wind gently blew through Samus' short blond hair. The crumbled hill she sat on was nothing special, just a slight five meter rise that gave way before her into a gradual dusty tumble of dull black rocks and reddish sand. Above her, yellow clouds drifted in the light of a cold red sun. The valley beyond was more of the same, broken rocks and sandy lifeless gullies. It wasn't much of a view, but it was there and it was hers to see. There were mountains in the distance.

The thin layer of ice forming on her eyes began to obscure her vision and she blinked it away again. Her helmet sat upside down between some rocks at her feet but she left it there even though she still wore the rest of her armored power suit. The cold stung a little more these days since the metroid DNA infusion but that couldn't be helped. Every once and a while she needed to feel the wind, even if it was only on her head. It had been almost two years since she'd gotten the chance. And besides, the faint tickle of acidic vapors in her lungs felt a little like home. Distantly, she considered smiling.

The footsteps behind her were getting closer. The spinal interface in her suit fed more precise signals; four bipedal individuals of around the same size, two much heavier with intense energy signatures. So power armor, but just on two of them. It looked like they were being polite. Samus leaned back slightly, her armored exterior plates clinking against a bit of jagged volcanic rock.

Now the newcomers were within five meters of her and they stopped at the base of the little hill. Their boots crunched against the bits of gravel on the basalt ground. One set of boots, not either of the power armors', stepped forward.

"Samus Aran."

The voice came out both though an exterior speaker and over com channels, arriving simultaneously through her ears and from her skull implants. A woman's voice. "We are agents of the Galactic Federation Police. You are under arrest for crimes relating to the destruction of Research Station SR388. We are here to transport you the fleet ship Diomedes for your preliminary hearing."

Samus took in one last deep breath and let it out slowly. The white fog of ice crystals gradually turned yellow as it reacted with the sulfurous air. Then she grabbed her helmet in her left hand and stood up. One more blink to clear the ice on her eyes and she turned.

Four humans in varying degrees of armor were waiting at the bottom of her low outcropping, standing in front of Samus's own yellow gunship. Their much larger black and silver GFP transport loomed in the near distance, squatting like a huge bird on uncertain ground. Samus didn't need her visor to know that both those soldiers in power armor were focusing all their targeting on the gun that encased her right forearm. After all, it was currently the most powerful weapon on this planet, and that included the main cannons of that ship they flew in on. She would expect nothing less of good soldiers.

"Please deactivate your weapons and come with us." The woman spoke again. Unlike the blank helmets of the power suits, Samus could see her face. She and her unarmored fellow were dressed in thin, heat controlled pressure suits and transparent oxygen masks, just a fabric-like layer of enhanced polymers between them and the planet's air. That might be why she was trembling as Samus walked down the hill, growing nearer with each step.

Samus stopped beside the woman and looked down at her. The woman glanced up, her lips slightly apart behind her faceplate as she tried to think of how to precisely deal with this very irregular arrest. Samus noticed a few strands of straight black hair hanging down near the soldier's ear, motionless even as a new gust once again brushed sulfur through Samus' own hair. In their suits, none of them could feel the wind.

That was a necessary sacrifice. Humans couldn't survive in this atmosphere.

"Er, yes," the woman said, glancing back at her teammate and the other two in power armor. "Thank you for your cooperation. Um..." Here she tapped at the neck of her suit and switched to an encrypted comm channel for her team. "Did she actually deactivate her weapons?"

Samus heard that just as easily, fed straight from the suit systems to her ear nerves. She also heard the slightly nervous response from the righthand armored soldier.

"How should we know? That thing she's wearing is a black box on every scan. The only way I even know she's organic is that she's got her flipping head sticking out. They weren't kidding about her by the way, in this environment? _Not baseline_ indeed."

The woman made a slight flick of her fingers at the soldier before she tapped her neck again and nervously smiled up at Samus. "Ms Aran? I'm Officer Yin. This is Perez and our escorts Park and Nigam. We have a seat ready for you on our transport back to the Federation ship Diomedes." Oddly courteous for an arrest, but then again Samus' status had always been a bit odd within the Federation. Well, 'odd' if that word could fluctuate between 'asset' and 'liability' at a frequency approaching microwaves. She wondered how Yin had been chosen to come retrieve her.

Samus started walking past them. There was a brief flurry of the skritching sounds of boots on gravel as the GF party scrambled to maintain the appearance of custody. Then, as they passed Samus' ship, she stopped again and Yin almost walked into her armored back. Samus turned to the officers and said:

"My ship."

Officer Yin recovered quickly enough from hearing Samus' voice for the first time. "Oh. Yes. Well, if you'll cede navigation controls, our transport's computer can plot an automated guide up to a holding berth on Diomedes. For the duration of your-"

Yin was interrupted by Samus casually banging her arm-gun twice on the nose of her ship and the subsequent roar of igniting thrusters. A wave of dust burst through the party as the yellow hunter-ship began to rise up into the air before reconfiguring to blast off at a steep assent. It quickly vanished into the cloudy yellow sky.

Samus heard Perez tap his comm controls. "Uh, Diomedes, looks like you've got an impound incoming. It'll be there...whenever it decides to show up, I guess."

One smooth motion of Samus' left arm and her helmet clicked into place over her head. Her vision was instantly once more filled with all the flurry of information she was used to considering part of her. Her senses were back up to fifteen and she wore a slight smirk as she noticed the soldier's weapons twitch up yet again in reaction to even that innocuous gesture. Perez took an unconscious quarter step back and Yin looked like she wanted to. All from putting on a helmet. They couldn't help it; there were enough stories surrounding that image of the Bounty Hunter, fully clad.

Samus didn't have time to deal with that and started walking once more in the direction of the GF transport, slightly faster this time. If they wanted to keep arresting her then they would have to keep up.

It took a second but they did so. The armored soldiers adjusted easily enough though Samus was quietly impressed that Yin and Perez managed to keep pace as well as they did. Over one-and-a-half times terran evolved gravity was nothing to ignore, especially for someone like Yin for whom a glance suggested that her slight frame was from a spacer adapted gene pool. Without any conscious thought, Samus' suit began scanning them as age, equipment, and past medical procedures began to flash across her eyes.

As they neared the transport ship, Samus noticed that Yin was glancing up at Samus even as she herself was looking down at the officer. Perez was keeping his distance while Park and Nigam were mostly concerned with maintaing firing lines focused on her back. But Yin was looking at her, curious inspection in her eyes and something that might have been...disappointment?

After a moment Yin was forced to respond to Samus' persistent matching stare. Those eyes were the only human part of her visible now, and even they were obscured and tinted green by the helmet's visor. Trying to match that gaze only led to Yin almost tripping flat on her face when she realized that she didn't have an augmatic suit to automatically walk across uneven ground without looking.

Catching herself, Yin said, " _Oof_. Um, I'm familiar with the files on you, Ms Aran, at least the ones my clearance gives me access too. It's just that..." She trailed off. They were almost at the Federation transport.

Samus was used to that unease. People on most planets often had a visceral reaction to being near unfamiliar power armor, even if their own forces used it too. And there was an inherent threat about Samus' appearance; it was a suit designed at every level of its being not just for combat or defense, but for war. War in any shape, against any foe, lit by any star in the sky. She was prepared for anything.

Yin started again. "It's just that...I thought you had long hair."

Samus actually froze in the middle of a step as she blinked with surprise just prior to touching the GF transport's ramp. She was _usually_ prepared.

Yin seemed to take this as offense and began to stammer, "Not that it looks bad this way! I actually kind of like it, I mean. Do you have some sort of system in your suit that changes the length for you or...?" She quietly trailed off once more as Perez treated her to an incredulous look.

Samus slowly turned back and stared with pure confusion over these priorities. It was honestly hilarious what strange things people focused on.

"Haircuts. It grows." Samus considered laughing but decided that would probably be too much. So she stepped inside their ship and made her way to the seats mounted the middle of in the fuselage. There was one which bristled with restraints, locks, and a moderate amount of mid grade explosives. She assumed that one was hers.

Truthfully, this time she'd lost her old mid-back tresses in the combination X-Parasite and metroid biological war-zone the GF's own doctors had turned her suit into during her last ordeal. She'd managed to eventually stabilize things but for a while the suit's organic systems had been running haywire and unguarded protein strands had a way of getting dissolved. It was actually quite interesting from a technological perspective, but at the moment she didn't feel the impulse to explain. At least she had her eyebrows back by now.

As a girl, her parents had loved her hair. Both sets of them had.

The GF soldiers locked into their seats on each side of her. Another encrypted comm line flared to life.

"Transport A-3 to Diomedes. Subject in custody and onboard. Lifting off for rendezvous."

The military ship rumbled as the main engines started up. Everything in its secure computer was instantly available for Samus to peruse whether they wanted her to or not, but nothing of interest presented itself. The other armored soldiers were still watching her and officer Perez glanced at her beam gun and the hull once or twice with an expression that had noticed his own outfit was not rated for vacuum exposure. Clearly there was a measure of uncertainty about precisely how much custody Samus was actually under.

However, something other than hairstyles was still bothering Yin, and after a few minutes of fidgeting slightly in her seat she worked up the nerve to voice it.

"There's something I've got to ask you but...well, I know the charges you're facing. And then you're out here at the edge of space." She looked up slightly before turning back in confusion. "You could have hidden forever. Why did we catch you?"

Samus paused, flicking her eyes over at Yin without moving any other part of her body. The smaller woman shuddered for a brief moment but controlled herself.

"You were getting annoying." Then Samus looked forward again, passing the time by reading the easily decrypted memory banks of this transport.

This pursuit had lasted sixteen months, back and forth across the border of Federation space. She hadn't made it easy for them to track her down, sticking mostly to nonhuman worlds, but then again doing her job even in an unlicensed capacity was hardly low profile. People important enough to slapped with bounties tended to leave a stir when they went missing. Enough of a trail for dedicated investigators to follow. Then there was that one capital which had built a statue of her. That was embarrassing, but she didn't have the number tentacles necessary to communicate her wishes in their language.

Destroying the SR388 orbital station had certainly earned the revocation of her Hunter's license but by now, according to her internal calculations, the repeated diversion of GF forces to wherever a glimmer of Samus Aran showed up on the nets had to have nearly reached a cost comparable to a significant fraction of the original loss's value. The upset scientists might bemoan the incalculable value of scientific discovery but their political superiors were well practiced in exactly that calculation. By stalling the issue this long, Samus figured that the bureaucracy would have rolled along and already mostly forgotten its plans with the research station in favor of shifting the funding to whatever replacement was the pet project of the newest rising cadres. Things moved fast in the universe and even with massive property destruction and a bit of treason Samus's record still looked rosy in comparison to many.

But in the end, it was truthfully Samus' curiosity had led to this surrender. She'd done reparation-by-service before as, like it or not, the Federation valued her far more than most of the individuals they considered their subjects. Samus was willing to take the odds on the charges against her if only buy a freedom from this military pursuit in a few years or decades. It was all the same, more or less. It'd long been an accepted fact that she was unlikely to find out what her natural lifespan was these days. Sometimes she wondered if she still had one.

But still there was something tickling the edge of her thought. Some trick from the mind expanding meditation her second family had attempted to teach her. Something was different now. Something added up strangely. And she was going to find out what it was, even if it meant sticking her head in a proverbial noose. She felt herself smile, invisible to all her supposed captors. The risk was familiar as, after all, mortal peril was pretty much her established method of investigation.

They would arrive on the ship Diomedes in twenty minutes. Samus recognized that name. On ancient Earth, it was a warrior who managed to draw blood from a god. It was a good name.

...


	2. Habeas Corpus

...

Samus stepped down onto the Diomedes hanger deck and very quickly reassessed some assumptions about her "capture". This place was huge. Racks of fighter craft waited along the walls and other armed transports were parked across the floor within the absolute minimum tolerances. At least twenty flight crew were moving around within sight and a full squad of armored marines stood at attention. Samus thought to herself that she might have slightly overestimated the GF's commitment to politeness. Two hulking point-defense bots shifted their metal limbs near the main exit, gun barrels the size of her chest aimed down at each step she took. Yes, they were not happy with her.

Her previous two armored escorts disappeared with obvious relief, passing off their charge to a group with stronger armaments. Yin and Perez might have wished they could do the same, but as the arresting officers they were tied to Samus side for the foreseeable future. Samus watched them shrink back a bit as their path took them between the huge robots, atlas-class anti-aircraft guns tracking the base of their spines. Samus shook her head as inside her helmet her lips curled up at the corner. The show was actually amusing. Apparently she was a prime bounty now. Then to the side she could now just glimpse her yellow gunship in the process of being rather well restrained into a secure docking location. She gave a familiar two fingered wave in the ship's direction as they left the hanger.

The escort stomped down long corridors. Off down a corner Samus saw another hanger in the distance. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. This ship was too big. There was no reason for something this size to be out here at the very fringes of the Federation space. Nothing in this system could justify even powering up the jump drive on this monster. But they had come only for her, and probably not just to seek justice against her. She was missing something from this cost calculation.

"Right in here," Officer Yin said, gesturing to an open door leading to a clean white room. "You'll be processed inside. Officer Perez and I will be waiting at the exit when you're done."

Samus stepped inside, armored shoulders just barely coming fitting through the width of the doorway. These bulkheads were extraordinarily thick, composed of sturdy, energy absorbing alloys. Sensible precautions, really, if woefully insufficient in this particular case.

The door closed behind her and Samus stood in the middle of the room, an orange and red metal goliath surrounded on every side by seamless white.

"Disable all armaments and exit from your armor." A voice came out of a few artfully concealed speakers. The voice was calm yet firm, any menace dulled by long repetition. Yet underneath it all was a trill of fear. Their sensors would be throwing up only pure confusion as they attempted to scan the Chozo technology.

"Your equipment will be released to you upon your acquittal or completion of your sentence. If you require assistance to remove the armor, automated systems will be made available." Translation: Get out or we'll cut you out.

She had no reason to keep them waiting. Samus reached up with her left hand and grabbed her helmet. It slipped off without resistance, instantly releasing at her will. She tapped it against her thigh and it hung there easily with an invisible bond. Then Samus closed her eyes and breathed in, preparing to step out of her skin.

The entire front of the suit began to unfold and part like a bio-mechanical chrysalis. Alloyed armor plates, contractile cables, crystalline nerves, energy systems, and shield emitters all slid apart in a chaotic ballet. Samus moved one leg forward and now her armor remained behind. She walked forward into the room while in the corner of her eye the shit resealed itself. Tiny shimmers danced over the sliding metal and organic systems as small bits of matter dematerialized and reformed to permit this geometrically impossible process. She felt light; light and weak.

"Step forward into the next room."

Samus glanced up at the speaker as a portion of the white wall slid open to real a small corridor lined with sensors. It seems the people running this inspection were fine with her not striping off her blue interface-bodysuit. It was just as well, the linkages with her biology took almost twenty minutes to deintegrate especially after such a lengthy fusion. The spinal connections always tingled a bit. Samus stepped forward through the door.

This new little corridor was less well lit than the previous room. In fact it was positively dark compared to the blinding white which sealed off behind her. The one of the hallway's walls was mostly taken up by a long window looking into an adjacent, slightly elevated room that housed the specialists examining her. There, a number of human technicians and officers were glancing at the invisible readouts of sensors which were already having a field day after finally being able to peer into her unshielded body. Yin and Perez were missing, presumably being quickly debriefed. This inspection was a little like being on display but still Samus felt a small warmth of comfort. There was something primally reassuring about standing unguarded among people who looked like her. However, another part of her was growing tenser by the moment.

Sensors spun, flashed, and pinged her with invisible radiation while behind the glass the science team conversed in the illusion of privacy. It was trivially easy to read lips of you were fluent in the language. Well, fluency and the subject deciding to remain facing you.

One of the technicians turned around from inspecting a readout on the far wall, already in the middle of talking. "... programs not even recognizing her as human?"

The warm feeling began to drift away again.

Another technician glanced over. "...that far outside even any of the divergent population DNA lines? The...and those fully adapted space colonists from the pre-FTL days with the deformed skulls slip through and this lady doesn't? I know her file lists her as augmented but the system should have been taken that into account."

"Just look at this. It's not just some suite of soldier boosts, even the most extreme. Her bones are laced with carbon fiber and an alloy matrix. There's vibratic tensile fibers in her muscles, abnormal tendon reinforcement, and at least three stable nanobot colonies I've found so far. Half her nerve ganglia are now crystalline fiberoptic and I'm not even sure what some of these other implants are doing."

A third man was now just staring at Samus through the window with disbelief and something between pity and fear. She stared right back at him from inside the silent scan room.

He said, "Even with all these documents I can't imagine her medical history. Everything on the surface looks perfectly healthy, but... The modifications were all post-utero but started long before puberty. Fifteen percent of her DNA shows splicing and her cells have three organelles not native to any human population. There's what I assume is Chozo modification, semi-random damage from long term radiation exposure and acute phazon poisoning, metroid based DNA therapy, and what's documented in the file as some sort of classified parasite infection." He sighed.

"At this point she's basically scar tissue in the shape of a woman. It's-"

Then he suddenly noticed Samus' focus on his lips and turned away as he continued talking. She breathed out. Yes, she was certainly back among her species.

Evidently this inspection was taking longer than it should be because a tall man with bars on his shoulder stepped inside the other room and started saying something that, when he was periodically angled Samus' direction, looked rather loud.

"What's taking...damned scan?!"

"..."

"If...you override it! Just get... before... out here!" With that he turned and strode out of the room again.

Very quickly a voice came over the speakers in the narrow scanner hallway. "You may step forward into the next room."

Outside, Yin and Perez were waiting once more, now with a new compliment of armored marines. From there the newly assembled convoy made its way down the ship corridors. Once or twice Yin and Perez tried to make light conversation but with all these gun barrels on hair triggers around her Samus didn't feel particular chatty.

Then they crossed a security airlock and saw up ahead a large dark room room covered with glowing analyst workstations. This was an absurdly well-outfitted ship. In fact down at the end of that room filled with advanced machinery and trained personnel was an armored door Samus recognized as the gateway to an Aurora unit housing. Indicators on the doorframe said it was empty. The mystery was growing by the minute.

There was a small group of people waiting at the edge of the room of where the white hallway intersecting that dark and blinking information cathedral. A black haired man in an unmarked dark jacket stood with his back to them, looking out at the banks of specialists and glowing computer displays. Whoever he was, he was flanked on each side by a taller man and woman in uniforms that bristled with obvious marks of rank. As Samus drew near the decorated man turned back and saw her. His expression was dour and unreadable as he leaned down slightly to whisper to the man in the blank coat. There was no visible reaction.

Officer Perez almost jumped as he snapped to attention when he recognized the people at the end of this hall. "Commander!"

The man in the dark jacket slowly turned as Samus got within a few paces of him. With casual interest she looked down and was met with piercing eyes staring up to meet hers. Her eyebrow ticked up slightly in provisional respect. So this was the man who controlled the interstellar fortress around them. There was a measure of power he exerted, which clashed invisibly against Samus' own presence in a way that unnerved the bystanders. His second in command edged forward, now trying to match stares on an even eye line with Samus but though he might meet her in height she had him beat by thirty pounds even before her special gifts were accounted for. Whatever sense of threat he was trying to project did not materialize.

The Commander continued inspect Samus. His eyes roved fearlessly over her body but there was no lust or anxiety, only a frustrated searching. She represented something to him, some resource he needed. The only question was what.

Then Samus heard Yin's voice behind her. "Um, sir? The tribunal is scheduled to start."

Well, they certainly weren't wasting any time. Which only made things more suspicious. Samus never trusted it when justice was swift.

...

Samus slouched back in her chair behind a little desk facing a semicircle of elevated people in various highly decorated uniforms. Above, this chamber had an actual vaulted ceiling, almost preposterous on a military ship. The whole tribunal was a joke. Worse than that, it was boring.

She'd barely been escorted into the room when an officer with grey at her temples slid into the seat beside Samus and quickly started typing on the interface which flicked to life on the desk. From the way the woman did not seem at all concerned with Samus' existence she had to assume that this was her lawyer.

After a few moments typing the woman finally looked up and inspected Samus' face, eyes quickly dancing over the faint phazon corruption scars across her cheek. The lawyer's voice was brusk and businesslike.

"Aran, I'm Michelle Ortega and I'll be acting as your counsel today. I'm familiar with your case. Rather familiar in fact, since I've had sixteen months to prepare." There was a note of frustration there. "Just don't address the bench without speaking to me first. Noting hurts a defendant more than talking too much. Got that?"

Samus continued looking at Ortega and leaned slightly further back in her chair. The chair creaked faintly.

"Perfect. Just like that." Ortega seemed as pleased as she was likely to get.

Then a general warning sounded out that the ship was warming up its jump drives to transfer systems in fifteen minutes. That actually did surprise Samus. It hadn't even been an hour since her apprehension, three hours since the ship dropped into this system, and this massive vessel was already basting off with all haste. That was a quick turnaround.

So this hadn't been a case of the Federation dispatching nearby teams to wherever they caught a whiff of Samus showing her head. Ortega had known she would have this assignment. This ship in particular had been hunting her for all this time. Or at least it had been consistently in the area, out here in the frayed edges of "civilized" space. What were they doing here? What could possibly be worth all the resources it took to operate this massive thing?

But once they dropped in and out of jump, hours passed while the other crew recovered from the physical and mental disorientation of warp jump. Samus sat in bored silence. Then the tribunal was talking again.

"...born to Virginia Aran and Rodney Aran on Colony K-2L. Most records were lost during the attack on..."

It still wasn't interesting. There was no need to listen to other people talk about her life. What was more important is what they weren't mentioning in all these procedures. Back in the examination chamber this crew hadn't received clearance to know the details of the X-parasite, and yet the metriod gene therapy directly resulting from her infection was easily displayed to them. Here the tribunal seemed to operating on the same level of information. Why was the metroid procedure declassified and not the details most relevant to the destruction of the SR388 Research Station?

Samus wished she could run these thoughts by Adam back on her ship, but the computerized mind was currently otherwise occupied. In fact she could currently hear his voice here in the tribunal room, listing off the many crimes against the Federation she had committed in the last two years. The Diomedes had of course copied Adam off the heavily modified but commercial grade memory banks of her gunship and the tribunal was currently interrogating selected snippets of his personality. He'd still be fine on the ship when Samus got back, but as she heard his voice reciting answers to all their questions and accusations it felt uncomfortably like she was being mocked by someone close to her.

However, if someone was trying to railroad her towards conviction, they were doing a very poor job of it. The list of charges they had levied against her were lengthy but utterly preposterous. Treason? Dereliction of duty? They had her dead to rights on a massive count of destruction of government property and grand theft, but here those points were muddled under a rambling thesis of conspiracy across decades. In fact the narrative seemed designed to bring up her best and most public actions; Zebes, the opening of Aether, the defense of Norion, and her assault on the Pirate home-world among others.

Samus narrowed her eyes. This narrative also mentioned the Chozo: mentioned them a lot, almost as much as her conflicts with the Space Pirates. Her childhood with them was frequently brought up, as were the technology of her suit and her enhancements. Even Tallon IV and Elesia were brought up in a rather forced way. Again, referencing the legacy of the Chozo. Most of those particular reports were signed " _-N_."

There was a hand behind all this. But in order to find out more Samus first had to sit through this interminable show. Old lessons of meditation came to her mind and as her stare locked on the head of the tribunal up on his bench. While he droned on about boring matters like treason and a threatened death penalty, her mind was cast out to the infinite web of existence that surrounded them all to the edge of the universe. So preoccupied, she didn't notice how profoundly uncomfortable that stare was leaving the man.

Then a change in his tone of voice snapped Samus back to attention.

"This tribunal finds Samus Aran guilty of the following charges: two grand counts of destruction of Federation property, unauthorized access of classified data, and reckless contamination of a planetary orbit."

Samus arched her eyebrow. Really, they didn't even find her guilty of stealing Adam? That charge at least was a slam dunk. They had the stolen property testifying in the tribunal room! Instead they transformed blowing up a multi-trillion credit Research Station into an orbital littering ticket.

The tribunal bench continued, "The recommended sentence is fifteen years imprisonment, commuted through government service and subject to parole. Commander Nakamura is herby appointed as your overseer. You are to report to him to receive your assignment. You are now..."

Here there was a bit of confusion as Samus had already gotten up from her seat and pushed past the surprised marines on her way to the door. She stopped when she realized that the Chair had not actually signaled the end of the tribunal. Samus was now politely waiting by the door with two pulse rifles pointed at her head. She gave the Chair a vaguely apologetic nod.

"...Er, you are now free to go."

Samus gave a two finger wave and strode off to push open the chamber door with a bang. Commander Nakamura: there was not really enough to go on but Samus' trained intuition told her there were good odds she now knew who "-N." was. She remembered the short black haired man from the hallway. She remembered his stare. The master of this ship had written half the background documents for her trial. This was quite a lot of trouble to go through to arrange a meeting.

Out in the halls Samus took advantage of the confusion from her shifting legal status to blaze her own path through the ship, choosing directions based on wherever looked like the places that someone like her should least be allowed to go. The sound of rushing footsteps behind her showed that Officer Yin had managed to extract herself from the tribunal room and was still in some nominal sense Samus' guardian. Once Samus got in the lift she decided to let a now breathless Yin push the correct button after she just slid in through the closing doors.

 _Nakamura_ , Samus visualized his face, those dark and searching eyes. _Let's see what you want_.

...

"Commander Nakamura will meet with you in his quarters."

Samus nodded to Officer Yin as the door to to the commander's room opened in front of her. Instantly, a lot of things became rather more clear. There was a consistent decoration theme in here and that theme was Chozo artifacts.

Miniature reproductions of statues lined a shelf and one wall was covered with a large and heavily engraved sheet of metal filled with the slashes and cuts of ornate Chozo script. Samus moved into the room, glancing at a framed slice of an ancient fresco mounted across from a piece of technology that even she didn't recognize off the top of her head. So, the commander was a fan of her second family.

Then she saw the man himself at far end of the room, once again standing with his back to her, now silhouetted against a full wall holo display. The commander who wore no decoration on his jacket. Behind her, the security door closed.

"Samus, it's good to meet you." Nakamura started talking without turning around. Glowing information continued to flow through the air in front of him. "I would have said more prior to the tribunal but given the uncertain nature of such proceedings I didn't want to unfairly get your hopes up. The sentencing was not my jurisdiction, though I had my hopes."

Samus quietly snorted as she peered past him at the display. As commander of a newly constructed Aurora-class warship out here at the bleeding edge of Federation space the things that were not effectively under his jurisdiction were limited to certain laws of physics. The computer displayed something about the movements of ships in this sector.

She was just waiting now for the other shoe to drop. Then he turned around and to her surprise his face was lined with worry. Something had him scared.

"Please, I need your help."

And there it was.

Nakamura continued to lay out his case. "I don't know what you've heard while hiding out here but things have been lively back in the core worlds. The Federation has been rolling back the Space Pirates since the end of the phazon crisis. Fantastic work there, of course."

Samus didn't say anything. She was naturally suspicious of praise from any source and right before someone asked her to do something was even more spine tingling. In her experience, pleasantries were rarely so.

Nakamura seemed to notice her reluctance. Perhaps in an attempt to set her at ease he moved over and sat down in a comfortable looking chair, but since Samus declined to notice his waved proffering of the other seat this maneuver just left her towering over him by still more.

"Right. Our business." He gathered his thoughts again. At least he didn't seem physically intimidated by her like many human men. "There's still an observation fleet enforcing a partial blockade on the Pirate home-world but most of the fleets had already fled out in every direction to the black beyond our reach. As a culture the Pirates put too many eggs in the phazon basket and without it they're still in full recover mode. An entire society in corruption withdrawals. There hasn't been much threat from them as a result." Here he paused. "At least no direct threat."

He waved his hand and glowing information popped into existence in the air beside his chair. Samus glanced over and saw holographic images of different breeds of Space pirates and technical specifications on a wide range of different ships. Then she looked closer. Some of those ship specifications looked off.

Nakamura was talking again. "For the last twenty-three months Intelligence has been following traces of a certain Pirate splinter fleet. Not the biggest by any measure but it attracted attention by being distinctly...heterogeneous. Heterogeneous and rather well behaved. When they fled the home system they just seemed to follow their own strange path out through space with not a single notable raid to their credit. Of course that made us think something had to be wrong."

Samus had walked over and was now stood very directly in front of Nakamura's seat, obliviously infringing on his personal space as she carefully studied the display beside him. After an uncomfortable moment Nakamura flicked the information over onto another projector and Samus was led away but she was too far into her thoughts to notice the reason for this migration. They were showing at least five Pirate ethnicities operating as a single fleet operation. That was something Samus had never seen before.

The pirates were a morphologically diverse species, made more so by their total lack of augmentation taboos, but their old world-bound cultures still shone through in their strong tendency to only operate in related clans. It as a much stronger instinct than even Humans suffered under, though tempered by the Pirate's willingness to reassign ethnic lines under the surgeon's knife or gene-molder's tank. However, this fleet was acting differently and strange behavior from your enemy was always worrying.

Nakamura continued, "While the main Pirate fleets have been skipping around with small raids in their respective territories of unclaimed space, this band of misfits seems to have called dibs on the most hard to reach sectors and then burned hard out beyond our furthest listening posts." The shadows played over his face as the projector flickered to display new information. "When they came back into our range they were changed. Their behavior was oddly restrained. One report even has them paying for goods they needed on an inhabited world, not stealing and salvaging every bit of technology they found. Because they already found something. Something lost out in the dark beyond Federation space. Something powerful and old. Archeotech. But now their violence is increasing again and the fleet is getting closer to inhabited Federation worlds, searching for something else."

Now it came together. But Samus was very used to military officers talking around what needed to be said. Given the chance they'd leave out information the size of a mountain and expect a soldier to "adapt" before plowing into its side. This pirate fleet had found something powerful out in the depths of space and was now turned on to other similar payloads. They had tasted a new treat and they were hungry for more. And there was a reason Nakamura was out here at the fringes. A ship like the Diomedes was not built to chase, but to protect.

She decided to speed this up. "You've already found it."

Despite having chosen her for precisely this task, Nakamura was still impressed. "Yes, we did. Admittedly, we already had it long before we knew they were looking. Once we guessed the Pirates had found something Chozo it wasn't hard to guess what was at the center of their narrowing search pattern out in this sector. Whatever was in their cache must have only described the general location of this other base." He nodded at the computer and once again the entire far wall lit up into a window-like display of a planetary landscape. A dry rocky landscape reaching up to a mountain of almost preposterous scale. "Admittedly we could still be wrong about their target but if they're collecting Chozo stuff out here then I'm feeling pretty safe about my bet."

In the light of the projected screen, Samus looked out at a mountain as thin wisps of clouds slowly splashed against its flanks. She had to agree with Nakamura; The carved image on the mountainside of a seated Chozo pointing forward was a pretty good sign. Since it was over half a mile tall and apparently wrought from more living stone than a whole city, one might even call it a great sign. The statue was larger than this entire ship. She smiled to herself. No one had ever called the Chozo self-effacing.

Nakamura saw that smile, but his face was still grave. "Now the crux. The Pirate fleet is coming, and there are five thousand human colonists living at the base of that statue. We only have a week to prepare and defend them."

That certainly changed the tone.

The commander was pacing in his cabin as the ship intercom announced preparations for yet another warp jump. Samus let him do so as she continued to cycle her finger in the air, scrolling through the information the ship's computer was projecting in front of her. He continued his lecture.

"This isn't the first time the Pirates have salvaged and adapted foreign technology. In fact, that's nearly all they do. I mean, you know that." Deliberate informality injected into his speech to build rapport. He was a good speaker. Possibly gained his advancement through politics. That wasn't a mark against him, just a different skill set.

He was chatty though. "Not that we humans can be to superior on the issue of technologic scavenging. I doubt there's a multi-system species in this galactic arm that hasn't been combing through the Chozo's ashes. They were invincible, rulers of space for five thousand years. Then they just...collapsed. In the span of a few centuries their dominion splintered, fleeing to hermitages and before disappearing completely leaving only...Well, that's not important right now."

Nakamura shook his head. "We've, I mean the Federation, have been learning what we can. Trying to rebuild something like the _Pax Chozo_ in this region of space. The Elesia research base eventually gave us the clues to planet J-4M here, though not without resisting. This planet wasn't on the standard lists of Chozo contacted systems. We only inferred its existence from forensic data, and extrapolated its location from a curious absence of recorded ship routs. But this little world may be the real treasure we were waiting for."

He gestured to the image of the planet, mostly brown with wide ice caps at both poles. "The Chozo love of secrecy hid it well. But unfortunately our current intelligence on these Pirates isn't much better. At first Sig Int were very confident since this splinter fleet of ours seemed much more talkative than normal, positively oozing communication traces as they left home-world and headed out to the black. But it's mostly unintelligible chatter to our code-breakers if its code at all. The best interpretation leaves the bulk of it as devotional wailings. These Pirates sound like a cult."

Samus frowned. Cult-like behavior? That didn't make sense. The Space Pirates were notoriously indisposed to religion. They took an almost pathological pride in their materialism, consigning the fields of philosophy and morality to the babbling of children. This was all very strange. Well, she could understand why Nakamura wanted an expert on Pirates, in addition to his Chozo fascination.

At that point he turned dramatically, arm held out to sweep her into his next topic. "The thing you must..."

He wobbled a bit off his step when he saw Samus wasn't there anymore and was instead now across the room. She glanced up from where she casually leaned against the wall and gave him a finger twirling "go on" signal. He did, but Samus thought that he was faintly offended she was not fully buying into his theatrical presentation.

"Yes. Well, for how openhanded the Chozo were at their height they took the balance of their most valuable secrets to the grave or wherever they went. Frankly, I'm a bit jealous if the Pirates found something this useful out there. We humans missed the largés of the late Chozo empire by just a few centuries at most and even down on J-4M we're mostly left with poetic prophecy and black boxes. And even with putting our Aurora unit down on the planet surface to help decipher, none of the relics have proved useful yet. They are pretty though."

He was gesturing to the inscribed slab on his wall with something approaching reverence in his eyes. Samus looked over too, casually peering a little closer to read the elaborate script out of curiosity for whatever the commander had scrounged up. Then she half choked in surprise as she blinked rapidly to clear the whatever emotion he might see on her face.

It was a poem, and the poem was filthy. Flowery and poetic, rife with metaphor, but absolutely obscene to its core. Samus was left struggling between bursting out laughing and burning with mortification. The bit about beaks and mountains alone was almost too much.

Nakamura continued, oblivious. "So much wisdom held inside. Now they're gone and we're just left with frustration. If only we could strip away the ornamentation and get a grasp on what they were really saying."

It took Samus a considerable amount of mental energy to remain expressionless. Apparently Nakamura's translator was serviceable but not culturally fluent. Mercifully he got back to the matter of the Pirates.

"But however they managed it, this Pirate fleet has shown signs of a technologic jump and a singleminded pursuit of more Chozo relics. Their first find has improved their ships considerably. J-4M must be defended, not just for the lives of the colonists and scientists down on the surface but because we can not allow this Pirate fleet to rejoin contact with the rest of their population. This fleet is behaving odd and we like the enemy we know."

Samus could agree to that. Truthfully, that expression might also describe why she had worked with the Federation so often.

Nakamura looked back at her, tilting his head down slightly even though she was much taller than him. "Well, there you go. All my cards on the table. You've got decades more experience and wisdom with this type of thing than any of my people. Out here at the edge, we humans are on a bit of tightrope but we're in it together. I'd ask you to help though you've already got a tribunal sentencing ordering you to do so." He met her eyes, dark brown locking on blue. "But I'll ask you anyway. Will you help us?"

Wisdom, he said. Samus breathed heavily. Her oldest enemies were arming themselves with her own strength and she had to figure out a way to take it back. With all this talk of the Chozo around her, Samus did not feel wise. Despite being around enough other humans to remind her that even if she didn't look it she was now over fifty years old, the carvings and the statues still made her feel so very young. Young and lost.

Her lips parted without conscious thought, catching her off guard with a whisper; a bit of wisdom long ago drilled into not just her head but her muscle. " _Energy is matter._ "

"What?" Nakamura was startled by this seeming nonsequitor. Then Samus realized that she had spoken in Chozo. But why had she spoken at all? It had risen unbidden from the unconscious depths of her mind. She hadn't spoken that language in decades.

Still, Samus felt no need to repeat herself. She barely knew why she said it herself. Somehow it felt like meditation, the techniques of generating new discovery from deep within the mind, like prophecy. So she continued to recite the rest of that old lesson, though switching languages to the commander's own. The translation didn't hold up, but she doubted Nakamura was conversational in the Chozo. "Matter is life, life is thought, and thought is energy. Past and future are the same present. All devisions are an illusion."

It was the first lesson and the last; the one her second family had tried to drill into her again and again. They called it the Blood of the Chozo. They said it was the sum total of all wisdom. Their eyes had smiled in a familiar sad way when she said that she understood. They had said it was ok that she didn't. Not yet. What did it mean that this had come back to her now?

Nakamura was over his startlement and gave a faint and weary smile of his own. "Why Aran, that was almost at speech. Not really relevant, but I'll take what I can get."

Then the final jump warning alarm went off. Samus and Nakamura sat down and strapped themselves in as outside the cabin porthole Officer Yin did the same. The Diomedes' metal ribs hummed as it prepared to head to J-4M, to protect another set of humans hunched at the feet of the Chozo from the specter of the Space Pirates. Samus supposed that for her it was a bit like going home. She breathed deeply and found peace within herself. With great and terrible power, the ship lurched beyond the speed of light

When they fell out of jump they met the communications of a colony that was already screaming.

...


	3. War in Heaven

...

Vibrations and distorted vision signaled Diomedes dropping out of jump with a soundless thump which hit the soul. Samus glanced over at her designated overseers. Nakamura looked rather groggy and pale at the moment; hyper jump was really disorienting to any mind not disciplined enough to handle it. But still, the people on this ship were experienced space crew and would be back in busy operation in thirty seconds or so. Samus closed her eyes again and tried to take advantage of this last moment of meditation available to her. Breath and the slow beat of thought was an anchoring rhythm. There was something moving in the fabric of fate; a thought hiding at the back of her mind. She sat and tried to recapture it in the music of silence.

Then the ship shuddered in pain. A blaring alarm instantly filled every vibrating particle of air as Samus' eyes snapped open. Nakamura fumbled for the computer controls as Samus was already out of her restraint seat and bolting towards the cabin door.

Nakamura called into the coms. "What's...Bridge, report! What just happened?"

He was still disoriented, they all were. It would be a few more seconds before the human crew truly registered that the ship was under attack.

Samus slammed the emergency interior release on the commander's cabin door as she barreled out into the hallway, rebounding off the wall as she changed directions. One of the decorative panels cracked under her shoulder and Officer Yin was thrown back into her restraint seat as she tried to rise but Samus was already gone down the passage at a full run.

From behind her, Nakamura yelled out, "Samus, what are...?! Dammit! Bridge, emergency alert and full countermeasures authorized. Fire on all targets! Clear our space!"

Samus' feet pounded on the hallway floor. They'd dropped into an ambush. The Pirates had somehow tricked the Diomedes into predicting a much longer path for the splinter fleet than they actually took. Now they were already waiting for the Federation's return to the colony planet. The pirates or someone else, she had to consider possibilities. In any case, the Diomedes was caught in the teeth of a trap and as Samus ran the huge ship shuddered again from another impact against the already stressed shields.

Silent cursing filled her head as Samus ached for the missing navigation displays from her suit visor. Her previous path through this ship had been too circuitous so she was relying on pure intuition from her time on other Federation ships to find the straightest route to her current destination. At this point she just had to hope that the lead designer of this new vessel class was human so she was working off the correct layout assumptions. She dropped down a stair port without once touching a single step and now there were uniformed crew around her rushing to their combat stations. They all had other things to worry about than her, and on a military vessel anyone running with this amount of determination was unconsciously granted at least a provisional sergeant rank so they got out of her way.

 _There_ , Samus thought, spotting a directory on the wall as she ran by. The intersection of munitions and quarantine. That's where they'd be keeping it. She was charging down a temporarily empty corridor but she knew better than to think that no one was watching her.

"Nakamura!" she yelled at the blank walls. "My suit!"

Then she rounded a corner and two armored marines stood between her and the destination.

Both weapons snapped up in response to the six-foot woman suddenly leaping through the bulkhead airlock and charging their position. Time slowed for a second as Samus' foot came down, two gun barrels targeted her heart, and one of the marines reflexively cocked his head as a coms voice began to speak in his helmet. Nakamura's crew was quick on the uptake and seemed to be already granting Samus clearance to pass by.

Unfortunately, that conversation would take a few seconds too long. Samus leaned back from her dash into a slide, letting her momentum close the distance as her toe shot up to catch tip of the first Marine's weapon, deflecting it up. Then her hand shot out to grab his armored ankle. There were a few crashes as the two soldiers were rendered into a state of no longer blocking the hallway and Samus regained her feet in a single smooth motion, recovering the small bit of speed she'd lost. She raced off again. People in power armor never expected an unarmored human to match their strength.

The quarantine lab fortunately had time to respond to the bridge's warning and the correct sequence of doors were open and clear for her, laying a path free of otherwise necessary violence. Then, there at the end of the corridor, a single suit of orange armor stood in an empty room. Even at full sprint, Samus felt a slow breath slide out of her lungs. The front of the armor shimmered and began to slide open. It needed no signal to recognize her.

Then they met and she was whole once more.

...

The Diomedes bridge blazed with red tinted combat lighting. Screens and holo displays blinked warnings as the seats deployed crew's void suits onto their bodies even as they worked the controls. Commander Nakamura briefly gripped an arm on a passing lieutenant's shoulder for stability as he skidded onto the bridge and his station, panting after the run from his cabin. He didn't bother yelling, right now all his crew knew their orders, but his eyes flickered from display to display as his brain overheated in processing the mess outside their hull. Hostile ships in every direction, and the planet stretched out below them. They were almost surrounded. Then the hostile markers were blinking red as they shifted around the map display.

To his right one of the crew reported. "Shield load spiking up to eighty percent but still holding."

"Bay two fighter launches complete."

"Direct hit. Enemy corvette disabled."

New alarms started flashing. "Commander! Data intrusion against servers Beta and...! Sir, intrusion on every network! They're ripping through our firewalls. They've got access to everything! I can't stop them!"

"Intrusion traced to...! Onboard! Quarantine level!"

Nakamura finished bucking himself into his combat station. Onboard? He could guess what that meant. "Deprioritize that intrusion. I know what that is. It's Aran."

"Sir, marines reporting single attacker on deck-"

"Yeah, that'll be her too." Half symbols on the screens abruptly turned red and the ship shuddered. "Focus on punching us out of this damn encirclement! Light them all up!"

News of disaster from the colony below filled his screen. The planet-bound Aurora unit was still filling a communication line with its coded assessment of the ongoing Pirate ground assault. Out here hostile ships were on every side, surrounded the lone Federation vessel and its spreading cloud of fighters. Nakamura felt a smile twitch at the corner of his lips. For a ship like Diomedes, surrounded meant that half of those hostiles would soon be relevant only as floating debris. There was a reason the Federation felt comfortable with Diomedes acting alone out here.

His chair vibrated faintly as the bones of the ship distantly hummed. The main cannon was charging.

The display in front of him continued blinking the colony's distress message. They had been under attack for three hours.

...

Information flooded in front of Samus' eyes. System warnings from across the ship. Telemetry data from the attackers out in space. Communications between combat stations as the crew of hundreds all rushed to their designated tasks.

The suit's haptic feeds and audio queues integrated everything into her awareness in a way that even the best computer terminal could only dream of doing. That cumulative pound and a half of Chozo computing could equal anything short of a full Aurora unit, however right now Samus was busy convincing those same systems that it wasn't worth smashing through every bulkhead in a straight line to her gunship in the hanger. There were currently enough people trying to put holes in this ship without Nakamura having to deal with holes spreading from within.

The Diomedes briefly hummed around her and two enemy indicators on her visor winked out outside the ship as Samus charged down the corridors. That would be the main cannon. Samus approved.

However, this whole ambush attack didn't make sense. Without phazon corruption maddening their decision makers the Pirates just didn't take risks like this. That rag tag splinter fleet Nakamura had shown her was practically guaranteed to lose at least half their numbers before they even scratched something like Diomedes. If they'd managed to get intelligence of the Federation ship being out of system, then the Diomedes should have dropped in to see the fleet scrambling to lift off from the planet J-4M with whatever loot they'd managed to grab during the the ship's absence. But instead nearly everything the Pirates had was out here in high orbit, waiting for a heavily armed battleship to drop out of jump.

Samus didn't like when things didn't make sense. But despite her confusion and unease, in the middle of this battle a familiar sense of balance was rising within her. She could feel her heart beating in her veins. There was a rhythm in her bones. There was part of her that loved this. Then, just before she reached the hanger, her suit flashed a warning as a horrendous crash ripped through the ship.

She continued forward and leaped through a twisted and damaged airlock door as a hurricane of atmosphere suddenly rushed past her, sucked into the hanger by a new vacuum. Her boots locked on the deck in an easy resistance but she stopped anyway to stare out at the newly missing outer wall. She was looking into the black of space. The ship's hull now ended at the edge of the hanger in glowing molten edges, blinding orange against the void, a void that flashed with the blazing spears of laser fire. Outside, new constellations swirled as missiles swooped towards their targets across thousands of miles. Comparatively tiny fighters swerved and sparkled in dogfights before they took a wrong move and bloomed into brief shining novas. All without a sound but the rushing of air from behind her.

In the hanger, Samus sprang forward. With each muted thud of her boots against the deck and each rumble of the suit's jets, ripples of speed boost energy formed around her armor as she accelerated towards the missing wall. Off to the right, her gunship was already powered up and broke free of its bonds, her suit's Chozo hacking smashing against the electric locks that restrained it. Samus didn't need to signal any plan; from inside the shipboard computer Adam knew her history well enough to predict what she was about to do and her personality well enough to not bother advising against it. Samus raced on, still building speed as energy shimmered around her.

Then she reached the melted edge of the hanger and jumped, thrusting her legs back as she thundered out into the black silence of vacuum. She smiled as the imagined music of battle whispered in her ears. She rocketed through space, alone.

Samus set her suit into a slight spin, taking in the conflict that stretched for a twenty thousand miles in each direction around her. For this moment she was too small a target to be focused on so she could think and plan without worrying about evasion. There were over fifty Pirate ships of significant size but they were getting shredded, or rather some of them were. Certain other ships were standing firm against the Federation munitions and something out here had ripped a hundred meter gash in the side of Diomedes. The Pirates had new weapon.

A metal surface thumped into her boots from behind, acceleration creating an imitation of gravity. The gunship had caught up to her and Samus was now standing on its nose, a lone woman perched on a mountain peak as it revolved through space.

"Adam," she murmured. "Where did the hanger blast originate from?"

The digital mind spoke from the gunship. "At this point, I believe I will simply transfer that question over to the Diomedes' encrypted communications. A few of them have been quite loudly wondering what you've been doing."

A second later, as Samus flipped backwards into the void before launching headfirst through the gunship's briefly open airlock, voices exploded into her helmet.

"Aran!" It seems Nakamura had seized the bridge coms. "That shot pierced straight through our shields with only forty percent power loss! It's frequency shifting or something...we're still analyzing. That's something new, and way too dangerous. Get back in on Diomedes this moment; we can't afford to lose you here!"

During the commander's pause for breath Adam gently interjected for Samus' ears only. "The beam origin is now marked for you."

Samus twirled as she maneuvered inside the tight gunship cabin, and locked into the cockpit harness. She glanced out the view-screen into space just in time to notice the blaring alarm of an incoming locked missile. A nearly mortal fifteen Gs of burn blasted the gunship out of the way at the last minute as she and Adam wordlessly plotted a weaving, twisting course toward the largest Pirate vessel.

Nakamura's voice came back over coms. He sounded resigned now. "And there's the intrusion alarm in our combat computers so I suppose you have the beam origin already. At least you're now out of range to keep hacking us but, Aran, be careful."

The battle was chaotic. Diomedes was successfully retreating towards the planet's distant horizon but that path turned the main guns away from the remaining bulk of the enemy fleet and the Pirates were pursuing. In fact, the largest Pirate vessel and its escorts were actually gaining on the powerful Federation battleship's acceleration. Again, that shouldn't be possible.

The expanse between this chase was filled with the clash of smaller ships. Dying fighters exploded like blazing confetti. Missiles detonated in a constant sparkle of pinpricks as laser shots traces a strobe-like web. Samus' ship dove into the heart of this.

A target reticule popped up on the cockpit display and a hunter missile fired from the gunship as Samus' finger twitched in command. She wasn't entirely sure if she or Adam had fired it. The AI clone of her old commander had evolved since those days when he had been issued in the failed attempt to control her. By now they'd reached a point where they barely talked to each other. Samus liked that.

A GF fighter radioed thanks as that missile shredded the Pirate raider that had been bearing down on it from behind. Samus just tapped " _acknowledged_ " as her yellow ship continued its knifelike plunge down the battle's neck.

Her cockpit shook as a partial hit nearly blew out one of the shield emitters. Samus jerked the controls and a hard evasive turn hit her with enough acceleration that she could feel it in her organs even through the ship and suit's dampeners. Another alarm went off. Atmosphere was venting through a pinprick somewhere on the gunship but she didn't bother with that. In fact, the cabin was only pressurized at all because she never bothering to change the factory settings on this latest replacement ship. She never risked removing her suit amid vacuum, no matter how secure things seemed. That was the sort of lesson you only needed to learn once in a lifetime.

The gunship fired again and again. A hundred miles away a breacher missile exploded against the side of a mottled black Pirate cruiser.

Adam's voice imposed itself over the alarms, silencing them. "The ship missile stocks are being depleted rapidly. This model is not suitable for this type of combat mission. I predict a seventy percent chance of total destruction before you manage to breech the Pirate command ship. Do you understand the risks?"

Text flashed onto the view screen. " _Yes/No_ "

Her thumb twitched to the right to select the option as a smile floated onto her lips. " _Yes_ "

Adam simulated a sigh. "I assumed as much. Well, I no longer regret being forcibly duplicated onto the Diomedes systems. No matter how they treated that copy, it is some small degree of enforced immortality." There was a slight pause, filled with the flashing of frustrated ignored alarms. "I wish I could do the same for you, Samus."

"Then let's not die."

Fighting in space was so quiet. Explosions sparkled like scattered gems but the gunship only made any sound when it was changing velocity or firing, or when an enemy's attack came near enough to brush against the shields. Otherwise, no matter how violent the spectacle outside, it unfolded in perfect silence. That was true even if every mammalian instinct screamed that it should be hearing the end of the world.

A beam of blinding light split the black expanse, erupting from the Pirate command ship to splash against the back of distant Diomedes in a shimmer of purple and gold and fire. That should have made noise.

Samus felt her heart thud as she watched the massive beam wink out. It had to be the weapon that had slashed across the hanger bay earlier. This told her that it had a long recharge cycle but even so she doubted Diomedes' ability to withstand a third hit. Nakamura's encrypted transmissions to his fighters in the battle had fallen silent. Possibly that beam had damaged something important to their communications. Samus locked her eyes on the enemy ship as she dove and rolled to avoid more Pirate fighters. So it was true, the Pirates had found some piece of new technology out in the wilds. None of this changed her mission but it added a more definite time limit.

She had to board the Pirate Command ship, find whatever ancient treasure these raiders had unearthed, destroy it, and escape preferably while disabling the vessel, all before the weapon recharged. She could do this. She could probably do this. Adam helpfully flicked a countdown to the top corner of her visor as all the while warning lights continued to blink around the cockpit.

Then her gunship exploded.

For half a second, sound and fire engulfed her. Then it was gone and Samus frantically twisted in her seat to see that fifteen feet of the side of her ship had been replaced with a jagged sparking hole into space. The stars outside were spinning.

Adam was speaking in her helmet. "Direct hit sustained. Catastrophic damage. Primary engine offline. Secondary engine failing. Reactor containment failing. Missile launch offline. Computer cooling-"

Samus interrupted. "Final burst of thrusters to confirm a near miss trajectory then red-line secondary engine without limiters, followed by complete transmission cutoff. Now."

She felt the dying ship shudder and screech under her as it complied. The fitful, intermittent rumble of the secondary engine told her that it was trying its best, even if it could only manage this for a few more moments of acceleration. Luckily they had already been going very fast and the enemy shouldn't bother targeting them again. It was easy to pretend to be a disabled wreck when you absolutely were.

She detached from her restraints and moved to the shattered hole in the side of her ship. Outside, the dark mass of the Pirate Command ship was growing larger with each appearance from the gunship's slow axial revolutions. The enemy ship's long spines glowed with dull purple illumination as it hung amid the stars, seemingly motionless even as this view spun. Then the vibrations in the gunship's hull stopped as the last engine failed. Her ship was completely inoperable and they were not on course to impact the command ship, if only by a few miles. Suit calculations said that at current angles the wreck would orbit the planet obliquely for twenty-six months before the orbit decayed into the atmosphere. Tactically irrelevant. Samus smiled. Really, it was almost perfect.

But she had to move fast. She reached up to grab the twisted metal edge of the hole in the hull before twisting and flinging herself out onto the still spinning exterior, free of gravity but fighting the rotating inertia all the way. Her boots locked down with a magnetic clunk as her inner ear tried and failed to do the same. She walked across the still spinning hull as her left hand signed out the commands to initiate downloading the gunship's computers into her suit systems. Adam would be coming with her. The Pirate ship rotated into view again, it was growing closer, then it was gone again and the planet rose again to fill the sky before its own descent.

"Data transfer speeds insufficient to complete task with the timeframe." Adam's voice was already losing the more subtle inflections. Those shipboard systems were heavily damaged. "Most transmitters are offline. You can not risk detection by boosting the signal strength. Do you understand?"

Samus had found what she was looking for, a fold in the outer hull where the armor was thickest. It would have to do and she could only hope that the fuselage hadn't cracked too much. She gestured to the right and the gun that surround her forearm began to expand and glow as segmented chunks of metal rearranged. The gunship completed another rotation and the Pirate Command ship swung by in a new arc, growing closer all the time. The pirates, the planet, and her; all spinning in space.

Adam was still speaking, "Download thirty percent complete. I have rigged the reactor and the remaining munitions together. Your maneuver window is closing." She hadn't vocalized her plan but it was obvious enough, even as pieces of Adam's memory overheated one by one.

She had to time this right. The gunship hurtled on, still spinning. Projected dotted lines in space appeared in Samus' visor as the powerless ship coasted towards the final calculation. There! Her gun let out a vibrating hum as an orb of white energy slowly detached from the barrel, small arcing sparks forming a web that held it still in that crook of the hull. The center portion of the orb was raised and seemed to be revolving; spinning faster and faster as the light it emitted curiously dimmed. Samus scrambled across the hull, magnetics and muscles fighting the centripetal force as she struggled to get more of the ship between her and that energy egg. You did not want to be standing by a Power Bomb when it hatched.

A flash of light and an impact like a mountain smashed through Samus' bones. Shards of metal slashed at her suit, draining a bit of shield strength as the magnetic systems surged to ensure she wasn't thrown off the hull. But after that single second there was only silence again; silence and the Pirate Command ship which was now directly in front of their newly modified trajectory.

Adam's voice was in her ear. "Successful maneuver."

Samus glanced at the indicator in the corner of her vision. " _Download 52%_ " It would have to be enough. Samus moved back to the rear of the gunship, finding the exact middle of the spinning axis. Adam had been reconstituted from worse. And there was no time for apologies. So she bent her knees, aimed carefully, and jumped with all her might up into the empty void of space.

The gunship hulk hurtled on down towards the side of the Pirate vessel and Samus trailed directly behind it at only a slightly lesser speed, just another piece of wreckage thrown free from the hull after some damaged systems must have produced a rogue weapons detonation. The Pirate command ship expanded against the stars below her as she fell towards it. A careful twist of her legs and she canceled out her rotational inertia, setting up a stable reference point to the command ship. Everything according to plan. Still, she held her breath as the next few seconds passed. But the Pirates didn't even bother shooting down the carcass that was aimed at their side. Nothing of the gunship's mass could do more than scratch the hull of a ship that large. That is, if four buster missiles and a warp-class antimatter reactor weren't all rigged to detonate on impact.

Samus felt her smile slip a notch. It was a pity she couldn't hear the explosion.

The flash was still pretty and as soon as it erupted Samus was firing hard with all the thrusters on her suit, bleeding out as much of this velocity as possible. The suit vibrated and hummed, Varia components venting heat buildup, as she plummeted down to a scorched hole in the side of curbed black metal. Despite herself, Samus squinted. This was still going to be be a hard landing.

She hit the inner bulkhead at a relative two hundred and sixty three miles an hour.

It only took a few seconds for the suit and her enhancements to ameliorate the resulting concussion, at least enough to allow her to get her bearings. It took a few seconds longer to extract her lower half from the hole she'd punched in the opposite hallway wall. It was an undignified, wiggling, metal melting procedure that left Samus annoyed, face first on the floor, and in the perfect mood to turn her attention to the two poleaxed Space Pirates in maintenance crew void-suits who apparently had been watching this entire performance. Samus raised her power beam as they belatedly turned to run, their pincers raised in panic. Sometimes it really didn't pay to be the first responder.

...


	4. The Fall

...

Samus' fight raced through the halls of the Pirate ship. Her visor displays were still notifying her that the suit's screw attack components had been dissolved into energy to absorb that first high speed impact. At least it hadn't been any of the more crucial systems; she could deal with that one ability being cannibalized. Her weapon still worked and she was currently blazing a path of destruction through a vessel that did not expect boarding via meteor.

A gun clattered across the ground as a purple-shelled Pirate slowly slipped down from the dent it had left in the far wall. Samus held out her right arm and shot off three blasts through the smoke and frost that now filled the room, hitting three cameras in each corner. A tap at her temple shifted her view and through the far wall she saw the dim x-ray outlines of five heavily armed pirates gathering in the next room to stem her advance. As she watched, one was angrily hitting its arm presumably trying to get some view of her room from the dead cameras.

So she waited. A few seconds passed as Samus idly shifted her weight back and forth. She took another look at her suit shield readouts. She'd managed to absorb enough energy from that last power main she'd gained access to that the suit was almost back up to her current operating capacity. Behind the wall, the pirates were still panicking. Samus briefly flicked her visor back to normal view and looked at that wall again without penetrating scans. Then she returned to watching the marshaling strike team through the wall but she wondered at what she'd just seen. This was the first time she had ever seen art on a pirate vessel. It was...disturbing.

The Pirates finally lost their patience or worked up their nerve. They moved over to open the door and were instantly met by the shrapnel of said door exploding under a charged super missile blast. The first to stand up screamed as the next shot from her gun froze three quarters of its body into a grisly statue. Samus hoped she'd managed to download enough of Adam's personality before the gunship blew. It would be a hassle to rip him out of the Diomedes servers. The remaining Pirates were screeching as Samus leapt through the air, dodging their shots in order to line up one of her own as her weapon shifted and glowed with charging energy. The enhanced plasma shot pierced through three of them and they fell back, trailing smoke and viscera. Her suit shield power indicator flowed upwards.

After a moment the shield indicator ticked up slightly one more time. Apparently one of the Pirates had taken longer to die than she would have guessed. _Energy is matter, matter is life, life is thought, and thought is energy._ Old lessons, drilled into her head long ago. The suit's harvest system was merely a practical demonstration.

These Pirates were a motley bunch. She briefly scanned the scattered bodies that littered this vaulted hall. There were purple shelled Zebezian tribes, the claws and fangs of the Talon fleet, and one example of the thin detrigrade legs and four eyes of the gene-line that had been on top of the home-world ladder during the phazon assault. What was it that brought these dregs together? Samus remembered the strange art in the other hall. There had been two abstract bipedal figures, presumably Pirates, floating in a web of swirling patterns. She wondered which group had painted it.

Then a low crackling roar rumbled through the long corridors, bouncing off bulkheads and ruined Pirate bodies. Samus' weapon snapped up, an attack already charging as her heart thudded so hard she felt her teeth vibrate. Her visor said that it was just a sound over the ship speakers, but Samus recognized that voice without needing the suit to list out the identification. That screech was etched on her bones. Ridley was on this ship.

Samus burst forward, ripping through bulkheads, firing off missiles into any open hatchway as she made her way towards the ship's center. As she ran, Ridley's voice echoed around her, every speaker screaming threats and orders to the Pirate crew. Samus retreated into the calm of battle meditation. She'd killed Ridely so many times before. He was the Pirate's perfect general, bred for war and cloned endlessly, modified to the absolute peak of their society's ability, dispatched to anywhere they needed a champion. And she'd killed him over twelve times.

So, this splinter fleet had their own Ridely; unexpected but at least they would only have the one. Ridely, the 'ultimate commander', never tolerated any perceived threat to his authority even from himself. Samus' left hand threw out a grapple beam to draw the next Pirate close as a briefly living shield against his comrades' fire. Then she fired from behind it and a second later her shield energy levels ticked up a few more times. She advanced, as behind her one of the ship's primary engine rooms exploded under her departing missile barrage.

She was leaving a trail of destruction behind her but it was almost purely incidental. She was searching for the artifact; the technological haul the Pirates had found deep out in space that wet their appetites for the J4M colony. However, the ship's computers were putting up a surprisingly firm resistance to her suit's scans; taking terminals off the network almost as quickly as she could access them. It was curiously good security for the Pirates to stand up against her Chozo tech but in doing so the defense betrayed itself. Samus plotted a course to the part of the ship that went dark to her the quickest. That was where their greatest treasure would be.

Then one final door exploded before her and Samus ran into an anticlimactically cramped room. After passing, and damaging, lab after lab and endless factory lines assembling new weapons she had expected this most secret chamber to be more dramatic. The dark room was still large and high ceilinged, important enough to be made accessible for even Ridley's great bulk, but the space was deserted and had a pervasive air of disuse. A single large cube, each side over twice Samus' height, took up most of the room. A dim golden light glowed from under the tarp that covered it.

Blue energy cracked around Samus' left hand as her grapple whip shot out and threw back the heavy tarp in a second. The cube was Chozo all right, she recognized the glowing golden lines that decorated its engraved metal sides. However, she had no idea what this thing could possibly be. Her scan gave back nothing but some low level power source and an encoded Chozo warning not to approach. The Pirates didn't even seem to be using the damn thing. There were no cables hooking it up to the ship computers, no disassembled components laid out to reveal their secrets. Just a lone abandoned box.

Then the room's only other door opened in a hail of blaster fire that heralded the end of investigation time. Samus threw herself behind the cube just in time to avoid most of the subsequent missile barrage as a full troop of armored Pirate commandos advanced at a full run. She needed to go. That first blaster volley had hit her unsettlingly hard. From cover her gun was already charging, devastating energy washing her face with white light as power built inside the barrel.

Her weapon-bound right hand made a sign and the gun morphed slightly, even as she sprang back to leap off the wall behind her. The charged beam spread out in wide stream of piercing energy, throwing the Pirates back as it cracked their power armor. Unfortunately two of them seemed to almost completely ignore that wave beam attack. Samus noticed the white lettering on their armor. Great, some of that advanced weapon-immunity armor. Someone had scavenged some stuff from the old Talon fleet. She really hated those.

The other Pirates were also standing back up far too quickly for Samus' liking. Her weapon changed configuration again as she quickly waved that arm in an arc, her visor lighting up with a flurry of missile locks. However, these Pirates were soldiers. They reacted in a spit second and threw up energy barriers from their off hands, setting a wall of oval shields in a semicircle before her. It would have been brilliant, if the gun that Samus was pointing their way was actually aiming at them.

Samus' arm shivered with recoil as a stream of missiles shot out in a sweeping arc. In the instant before they hit the Pirate barriers the missiles swerved up and over to slam into the mystery cube. Even that many explosions all converged on a single point was not enough to destroy Chozo metal, but it was enough to crack it. The super missile that followed it was what actually blew open a hole into some inner compartment of the cube, and the next was enough to thoroughly ruin whatever was inside. The one after that was mostly for fun.

Even Samus had to admit the next few missiles were probably redundant.

A moment later she skidding out into the hallway, her armored shins raising sparks as they left scratches in the metal floor. One of the Pirate elites was dead, another injured and confined by ice for the next couple seconds, but that still left too much firepower for Samus to want to deal with. Whatever that cube had been she had destroyed it. Luckily this ship's builder seemed to have really liked long straight corridors. Samus felt her heart fall back into a steady rhythm as she ran. Blaster fire impacted her from behind, draining her shields, but a sheathe of shimmering energy began to build up around her suit as she accelerated still faster. She ran and in a moment she was a blinding streak that crossed the length of the ship like lightning.

Scan said that the main hanger was through that next bulkhead in front of her. Samus squinted her eyes as there was a slight crunch. Then there was no longer a bulkhead and she was in the hanger.

Samus slammed to a screeching stop and then jerked to the side as her suit jets threw her off at an angle, dodging a blast of the hanger's point defense cannons. Ridely was screaming out over the ship coms again but he still hadn't decided to show his face. Unfortunately a great number of his underlings had. A _rather_ great number. Samus was already firing but it was mostly suppressive at the moment as she quickly dashed for cover.

Metal scraped metal as she thudded her back against a bit of solid looking machinery. She needed to get off this ship. Information flew across her eyes as she scanned the Pirate systems even as their powerful data security continued to push her back. Suit missile stocks were still pretty good though so she stuck her right arm out from behind her cover and shot out a few more at any target lock that popped up to her suit systems. In the middle of the following series of explosions a deeper rumbling traveled up her legs from the hanger floor. Samus looked up to see an inner hanger wall open up to reveal huge mechanical arms carrying a Pirate fighter craft out into launch position. Scan said it was a rush repair-and-relaunch job from something sustained in the battle outside. That could work.

Samus focused her attention for a moment back on the mass of Pirate troops on the other side of her cover and noticed that there was not much return fire happening at the moment. That meant it was time to move. Above, the Pirate fighter-ship's engines hummed up into ignition as the mechanical arms withdrew from it. Samus raced forward and jumped up, suit jets blasting to double the apex of her leap. She bounced off the hanger wall and leapt back again, thrusting out her left arm as the grapple beam deployed from the back of her hand. It attached to the fighter belly with a crackle of blue energy even as the engines roared to life in launch. Her speed added with the ship's carried her up and over in a tight swing, suit magnetics latching down on the top of the hull even as her grapple stretched and broke.

The ship burst forward out of the hanger, and Samus turned back at her attackers down on the deck, wearing a cocky grin. Then her smile slipped. Now that she could see them all at once, she recognized that there was a reason this maneuver of hers had been so easy. Most of the pirates were not shooting. True, some individuals and teams were unloading in her direction with futile desperation but squad after squad were simply standing there in the hanger and watching her go. Now that she thought of it she wasn't sure they had ever fired on her. Then the Pirate fighter carried her out into space beyond sight. The uneasy feeling in her stomach grew.

That feeling was not helped by the fact that someone had clued in the pilot of her ride to the fact that he had a very hostile barnacle attached to his hull. Samus could look down into the cockpit where the Pirate thrashed at his controls and sent the fighter into a chaotic mess of spins and rolls, desperate to fling her off his ship. That was annoying. Samus tapped her temple and the suit scans proceeded to disable some of his flight controls. Fortunately, whoever had been upgrading that Command Ship's software hadn't gotten to the fighters yet and the Chozo suit still smashed through these systems. Samus even got access to battle telemetry, though the news there was less good.

The Diomedes was a _long_ way off. Evidently they'd made good advantage of the damage Samus had managed to do to the Pirate command ship's engines and had pulled away from the pursuit to actually near rounding the planet's horizon. The remaining GF fighters were pulling back too, though there was still a good amount of combat happening in the intervening space. In fact, as Samus' unwilling ride twirled and swerved through the black, she saw another briefly nearby pirate fighter that was still making a direct bee line towards the Diomedes, a path that cut deep down towards the planet's atmosphere. Another opportunity.

It was tricky timing but the suit handled the calculations. The virtual mark in space approached, then Samus jumped free of her frantic fighter and sailed through space on a high speed intercept course to this new ride. She just barely got within grapple range but managed to draw herself in as it continued to accelerate on towards the Federation ship. She was heading back into the fight.

With this ship's current orientation the planet hung above her, close enough to blot out half of space. White storms and white ice mixed with brownish green land and a few equatorial oceans. For the first time since arriving in this system Samus directed her suit to scan to place, to learn something about J-4M other than the fact that the Chozo had been there once and the humans were there now. Atmospheric data and a Federation data entry popped up and started scrolling for a second. Then those entries blinked and abruptly disappeared. They were replaced by a single word of text displayed across Samus' visor.

" _Welcome_ "

That was decidedly ominous.

Then the Pirate fighter under her feet shook and the planet began spinning around her. Samus looked to the side with disbelieving exasperation at the hole some GF fighter had just shot through her ride. She really wished ships would stop getting shot out from under her. This was becoming a serious problem and the planet rapidly becoming much bigger was an even more serious one.

The Pirate pilot's distress was very briefly increased as a sudden blast ripped his cockpit canopy off and an orange gauntlet reached in to rip him out of his seat before hurling him out into space. Samus swung into the newly vacuum-filled interior and set about trying to wrangle things into order as the suit patched into the ship computers. Unfortunately, what the ship computers told her was that core containment had been breached and the main reactor was a few seconds away from exploding. These Space Pirate constructs really weren't built to last. Samus spun the ship around to face away from the planet and set the engines for full bone-crushing burn, cutting speed as she prayed that the antimatter containment was failing more in the direction of five seconds rather than two. Faint orange flames began to lick around the edges of the shattered cockpit as they plummeted into the atmosphere.

Samus managed to fling herself out of the ship right as her suit said that it was now more improbable that the ship had not already exploded. The quickly following flash still thudded against her personal shields but at least she'd managed to get behind it so the explosion bled off a little more of her orbital velocity. That was nice. However, that meant that she was still left hurtling toward the planet's surface with reentry flames burning through her fingers. She was all out of ships.

Well, this was the first time she'd experienced free-fall reentry. It was actually rather pretty though likely to be fatal. She was above the planet's northern hemisphere where the massive polar ice caps eventually gave up against an expansive barren mountain range whose southern slopes were marked with dark lines, branching and joining as they led down to the equatorial lowlands that actually supported life. There was now a dim haze of panicked radio messages drifting up from the surface as the populated area rotated into view. A little blue icon blinked on near the horizon and slowly moved into Samus' view as the suit told her the human colony actually lay perfectly at the end of her uncontrolled descent.

Somehow that did more to add to the sinking sensation in Samus' stomach than the hurtling fall to her probable death. She'd made no effort to aim her trajectory and yet out of an entire planet she was aimed directly at the one place she could possibly want to go. There had been a few times in her life when she'd felt the touch of something like fate. She never liked it. Her second family had taught her that probability and chance was a mind of its own, the gestalt of all matter and thought in the universe. That it could have a will and a direction like all other things; a music to existence. But they had also taught her how to survive and right now that had to be her chief concern.

The friction flames around her suit had now increased to the point that they were interfering with her organic vision. Samus briefly flipped feet first, fired her widely insufficient suit jets, then returned to the flat limbs-spread areobraking position as she waiting for them to recharge. Over the nineteen minutes until impact she would have to repeat this two hundred and twenty eight times to of bleed off every last scrap of velocity that she could hope for. Unfortunately, the suit told her exactly how much she could hope for in the distance provided. She would hit the ground at five hundred and thirty eight miles per hour at a sixty degree angle. The visor displayed those particular numbers in red.

Absolute surety of death was oddly familiar. She'd made peace with death so many times before. The first had been when she was six years old. Her second family had saved her then. They had saved her body and then they had saved her mind. They taught her their view of existence; that nothing ever ended. Death might come at anytime but the discrete self was an illusion, just as the discrete now was an illusion. When Samus died she would not be gone. All the times she had been alive would always still exist. Every memory was still alive, and every future she had ever imagined was just as populated as when she first envisioned it. They were all equally true in their own way. The old lesson always helped in these times. It was designed to lead her to peace and to union with all the other minds that had ever roamed this universe.

However, Samus was nagged with a bit of guilt as she fell to her death, alternating suit jets and spreading against the bone rattling wind. This time she mostly just felt bored. She'd died too many times before. The ground was approaching. Outside her suit the wind was screaming.

Red alerts flashed across her visor as the suit gave up on organic reaction times and prepared for its worst case scenario. The mountains rose up below, now actually visible in relief. The suit glowed and hummed as it readied all remaining shields and any possible bits of matter that could be converted into energy to soften this impact. The mechanisms curled her into a ball as barriers shimmered into temporary existence around her. In the rapidly approaching distance Samus briefly saw a light glint off glass or metal down amid the dust. She supposed that was the human colony. The buildings sat at the mouth of a network of canyons or riverbeds that stretched up to the end of her projected path.

Then Samus saw the mountain Nakamura had shown her, looming high above that little human settlement. She saw the giant statue of an unknown seated Chozo carved out of its side. As she fell, the outstretched hand almost seemed like it was pointed at her. She smiled as the suit screamed warnings and alarms. She liked that.

Then she hit the ground.

...


	5. Blue Birds

...

Samus couldn't breath. Then she shoved the stuffed bear a little more to the side so it wasn't squeezed against her stomach anymore and she had more room under the bed. She pressed her fingers against her mouth as she tried to stifle her giggles. The corner of a purple bedspread hung down over the side so the young girl had two trapezoidal windows to look out from her secret hiding spot. The giggles returned as a pair of shoes stepped through the door and stopped.

"Samus, I don't have time for this right now. You need to brush your hair before your lesson and you're already almost late."

At this Samus could no longer restrain the noise and a brief snort of laughter burst out. At once there was a heavy sigh and a hand reached down to grab an edge of the blue patterned blanket that Samus had taken great pains to spread out under her bed prior to executing this plan. However, now that precaution seemed to have doomed her as a tug on the sheet corner sent her legs sliding out to be exposed to her mother's reproachful face.

"No, mom, no fair!" Samus yelled from half under the bed as she tried to wiggle her little legs back under their hiding place.

"Out right now, missy, or I pull you by your ankles. I imagine you'll get a nasty bonk but that'd be your fault wouldn't it? Come on, up."

Reluctantly, Samus pushed her way out from under the bed, pulling her t-shirt back down over her belly while treating her mother to the best face of rebellious dissatisfaction a six-year-old could muster.

Her mother did not seem to be impressed. Her brownish blonde hair was tied up in a pony tail and her work device was in her hand vainly blinking out text to an audience that was currently dealing with an excessively wiggly daughter. "Up up up. You know it starts at one thirty. Do you have your stuff in your backpack?"

"Yeah." Samus grumbled in a vaguely ground-ward direction. Her little pack was over in the corner, stuffed with a colorful folder of loose papers and a plastic recorder instrument that poked out through the zipper. The backpack had a picture of a bird on it. It was blue.

Her mother was glancing at the screen in her hand, trying to figure out whatever she had been looking at before her daughter decided to institute guerrilla warfare against music lessons. "Thank you. Now, your hair? Go brush so you don't keep Mister Alvarez waiting."

Samus stomped over to her bathroom and attacked her shoulder-length blonde hair with the brush for a few fierce swipes until it quickly became obvious that the display was hurting her far more than anyone else. No one was watching her defiance.

Hair tamed and backpack wrangled Samus stepped out into the empty front hallway and glanced around uncertainly. "Mom?"

"I'll be there in just a second," her mother called from the other end of the house, having jumped onto some other activity already.

Samus muttered to herself on the general topic of parents complaining to her about not being ready and then always finding something else to do at the last minute. She lightly kicked her foot against the little emergency breathers box set in the wall by the front door.

Then her mother came bustling back, the screen now stowed somewhere and a tired smile on her face. "All right, we can go. Got your backpack? Your practice sheets?"

"Uh huh." Samus crossed her arms in a show of exasperation. "Is dad coming home for lunch today?"

Her mother tapped the panel beside the door and it slid open easily. She followed Samus outside as she answered, "He'll be back by the time you're done with your lesson. We'll have the rest of that stir fry from Friday, ok?" Then out on the sidewalk she leaned down to give Samus a hug. "Have a good time, honey."

Samus squirmed slightly as bits of her mother's hair got in her face. "Mom. You don't need to watch me. I can go by myself." Really, it was only a block and a half. She could see Mister Alvarez's door already from here.

"Maybe not, but I want to. Now go on."

Samus turned and started off down the sidewalk, waving vaguely behind her. It was embarrassing. Luís already took the trolly line two whole stops by himself to get over here and he was only a year older than her, but Samus had her mother standing on the street-side watching her walk along as if she'd manage to get lost in sixty yards. But soon enough Samus forgot to be irritated and instead glanced up at the muted sky above. It was actually bright today and the sun shone down as a slightly diffuse orb above the transparent flexible dome that covered her neighborhood of the colony city. The shadow of one of the dome support struts crossed the sidewalk and Samus hopped into one of the little triangle gaps in it to avoid touching the dark as she passed.

Then she reached Mister Alvarez's door and reached up on her toes to tap the standard panel beside it. The door slid open and she could hear Mister Alvarez laying out homework for the kid before her. Samus thought her name was Kay.

It was twenty minutes into the music lesson when the alarms went off. Mister Alvarez jerked back in his fluffy stuffed armchair and stood up as quickly as he could but he told Samus to stay in her chair and keep practicing the finger positions for the next song. He told her the alarm would probably stop in a moment. But Samus watched him hurriedly shuffle over to one of the computer stations and peer at the information it was flashing out. He looked back at Samus and told her everything was fine, they just had to stay inside for a moment until the all clear notice sounded. Samus slowly put down her recorder. Mister Alvarez had white hair but he hadn't learned to lie very well.

Samus felt something rumble under her chair. She jumped down so she could have her feet on the floor. She'd only felt it for a moment but it had been like when they were doing construction nearby; a big whump against the earth. Mister Alvarez told her that everything was going to be ok and to get back into her chair, but his voice was getting louder and he was breathing heavily. He was lying. Samus ran over to his couch and climbed up to look out the window behind it.

At first everything looked normal. It was just her street and her town, with the sun shining up outside the dome. Then she saw a distant streak of fire trail down from the sky and land out beyond the rocky hills around the city. Her heart began to pound. Someone had crashed. That was a ship falling. Her eyes squinted and focused. There were other shapes in the sky, other lights flashing and swerving. Then all the building sides across the street from her window suddenly flashed brighter than looking at the sun. An instant later the ground jumped and shook with a terrible boom.

Samus screamed and Mister Alvarez's soft but bony hand grabbed her arm and pulled her back from the window. He was yelling at her to get into the center of the house but she was crying and she didn't know what was happening. The emergency box by his front door was open and he was trying to get the clear breathing mask on over her head. Somewhere in the quiet behind Samus' eyes a little voice of hers was saying that he was doing it wrong. Grown ups were supposed to put on their mask first and then help her if she hadn't gotten hers on yet. Missus Yang had told them that. There'd been pictures. It had been a panda bear showing them what to do.

The ground shook again and everything in the house rattled. The alarms were still blaring, but somehow that last shaking had resettled something in Samus' mind. She wasn't screaming anymore and she couldn't tell if she was still crying. The mask meant she couldn't touch her cheeks to check. Mister Alvarez leaned in the corner, clutching a screen as he held it very close to his face, muttering wordlessly to himself as the blood drained from his face with each word he read. Samus took one last look at him and then bolted for the front door.

Mister Alvarez screamed after her but Samus could feel that her own fear had retreated for a minute. She was thinking more clearly even as her throat hurt with worry. If an emergency happened you were supposed to stay in place. But if a big emergency happened the important thing was making sure her parents found her. Her mom and dad were both back at home, so if she ran back they would be able to stay in place instead of coming after her. Two people staying in place instead of just one. She jumped up to slap the door panel and Mister Alvarez' front door slid open.

Outside it was windy. Samus kept running but she didn't understand that. Inside the colony it was only windy in certain places, near where the air systems were. But she reflexively squinted her eyes against dust that whipped her bare legs even as it pattered off her clear breathing hood. A bit of hair was in her mouth but she couldn't reach it inside the hood so she just tried to spit it out as she ran. All the sounds were dulled and muted but the sound of her breathing. Then a shadow covered the street and she stopped. She was alone out here and she looked up. A huge ship hovered outside, up over the dome. It was black and it hid the sun. Then objects began dropping down from it, straight through the top of dome.

It only took a moment before the wind began to shift. It intensified and the sound of it beating against her breathing hood was all Samus could hear. The dome was ripped and it felt like the world was screaming. No, that was ok. Missus Yang had told her how to deal with that. She already had her hood on. All the houses could seal themselves and had their own air lines and even then it would take a while to empty the whole dome even through a big rip. They could fix rips. She just had to get home and she was almost there. Then Samus realized that she was still standing motionless on the sidewalk.

She turned and continued running even as the ground shook again. There was flickering orange light in the distance, like fire. Then a screeching sound was drawing nearer and Samus looked up to see a long ship the size of a house pass over head, inside the dome. It was black and purple and as she watched it slowed to a hover a few blocks away. Dark shapes dropped down from it. They were shaped almost like people.

Samus ran down the empty sidewalk, feet pounding as hard as her chest with each desperate breath she drew. It was only thirty yards, then twelve, then she was there and she threw herself against her door but it wouldn't open when she hit the panel and she was stuck outside and she kept hitting the panel and it wasn't working and the wind was roaring all around her and she was so scared. Then the door opened. Strong arms pulled her inside and Samus screamed at the faceless mirror that clutched her. Then the moment passed and she recognized her mother with sunlight reflecting off her own breathing hood.

"Samus! What are you...?! How...?!" Then her mother gave up on speaking and just pulled her in for a hug so tight it made Samus' bones hurt. She never wanted it to end.

"Samus?!" Her father's voice boomed through the house, higher pitched than she had ever heard it from stress and worry. "I thought she was over with Ricardo?! Why was she outside?!"

"I don't know!" Her mother screamed back, hurting Samus' ears as her face was squeezed against her mother's chest, the plastic breathing hood smooshing uncomfortably against her cheek. Then her mother pulled her back a bit and looked down, her eyes wide with panic even as she spoke reassuringly at a breathless pace. "Are you ok? Are you ok, honey? It's ok. Everything's going to be all right. You're safe. You're safe." She looked back at her husband. "She hasn't said anything. What do we do now? Where do we go?"

Samus' father was pacing back and forth. His hand went up to rub his brow and was thwarted by his own breathing hood. He punched out at the wall and Samus winced. He saw that smallest of gestures and suddenly went very still for an instant as all his muscles tensed and released. He was very tall and his blue full-body mechanic's uniform almost made the hood seem like a normal part of his outfit. His eyes were blue too.

"All right," he said, now calm and in control. There was still a tremble in his voice. "City Hall still says to stay in place but we're right at the southeast corner of the dome. The tunnel to Central over there's through living rock, we actually have a chance of holding that. The defense force will be deploying from that direction, anyway. We'll make it inside and then to Central or one of the reinforced underground facilitates. The Pirates will just be grabbing what they can on the surface before Federation forces show up so they won't bother us in the secure places."

Samus' mother grabbed her daughter's shoulders. "Samus? Ok, honey? We're going to be going outside and I want you to hold onto me for every second. We're going over to the A-2 tunnel, remember that? And if you lose sight of me for any reason I want you to keep going there, and keep going inside until you see a police officer and go where they point you. Ok? Got that? We're all going together and we will follow you, ok?"

Samus could hear fear in her mother's voice and it made her chest hurt. She nodded. In a very small voice she said, "I left my backpack at Mister Alvarez's."

Her mother wasn't looking at her anymore. She was moving towards the rear door and her grip on Samus' forearm was so strong that it hurt. "That's ok, honey. Now we're going to be going fast so get ready." She looked over at her husband who had vanished into the other room for a brief second before returning. "What are you grabbing?"

"My toolbag. Could be important. I threw some of your necklaces in too. I didn't know-"

"Don't worry about that! We have to go now!"

"Mom? What about Mister Alvarez? And my friend Luís? Do we need to call them and tell them? Do they know where to go?"

Her mother still wasn't looking at her. She was just pressed against the rear door, moving back and forth to look out the narrow viewport. "It's ok, you don't need to worry about them. Everything will be fine. Now be ready to move with me. Ok? Stay with me."

The door opened and her parents hurried her out into the wind and blowing dust. Everything looked the same, but very different. The streets weren't empty anymore. There were other people out, running. Some of them didn't even have their hoods on and held arms up over their mouths as they staggered in the thinning air. It was cold out here.

Her father lead the way and her mother kept a tight grip on her wrist. Samus tried to grab back and return the hold but the angle was wrong for her hand to bend and the cold air stung her palm. So she clenched her fingers into a fist. Something was on fire and the grey smoke blew sideways to fill the intersection a block down the road. They were running past it.

There was a sound like fireworks and something bright flew out of the smoke. There were a bunch of them, like blinding streaks, and they hit the side of a building with cracks that hurt her ears even through the hood. Her father yelled but Samus could only hear her own heartbeat. Then a tall dark shape stepped out of the smoke and dust at the other end of the street.

It was like a person in armor, but bigger, made of spikes and blades and claws. And it was wrong. It was shaped wrong. Then it threw back its head and a horrible chittering scream rang out against the wind. New black shapes appeared, crawling up over the houses and roofs. They raised their arms, there were flashes and something behind Samus exploded.

A slam hit Samus' chest as her mother's arm thrust against her hard enough to knock out her breath. Samus sailed back, thrown by a mother's desperate action. She landed on the sidewalk and pain shot through her as her head bounded off the pavement with a sickening clunk. Her shirt sleeve was ripped on the cement along with the skin of her elbow. She gasped repeatedly as she wobbled to stand up, in too much pain to cry. Her ears were ringing.

"Samus! Run!" Her mother was screaming.

Samus turned back and saw that the front of a building had fallen down. It was broken and her mother was lying down on the ground at the edge of the rubble only a few feet away. There was something heavy lying on her legs. Samus' father was trying to to lift it.

"Mom!"

"Samus!" Her mother's eyes locked onto her with such a fierce desperation that Samus couldn't breath. "Samus, run! You remember the plan! Run, now! Run!"

Her father was straining, trembling as his strong arms and legs still failed to lift the rubble. The side of his blue jumpsuit was stained with red streaks. Samus didn't know what to do. The dark and spiky shapes were getting closer.

Her mother screamed. "Run!"

Samus turned and ran. Her eyes were fixed on the sidewalk as she ran as fast as she could ever remember. She was still dizzy. Her lungs pounded, her throat burned, and her head still rang like it was stuffed with cotton. A swift shadow passed over the street. It was like the wing of a bird. A bird larger than any she had ever seen. Then an inhuman screech blasted from behind her. Samus still ran.

She dashed around a corner and saw her family's chosen escape path. It was burning. Vehicle wreckage was strewn across the tunnel mouth, blocking it. Samus saw people lying down over to the side, people in police uniforms. They weren't moving. She realized that she'd stopped running. She stumbled forward and back forth. She didn't know what to do. She turned back the way she'd came, begging to see her mom and dad running out to pick her up.

Instead, she saw huge shape crawling up a three story building a few blocks away. The thing reached the top and settled into a perch as it surveyed the smoking city. Huge bat-like wings flexed, partially furled against its back. A long neck snaked up to a huge reptilian head of teeth and its thin barbed tail trailed down beside its feet. It was holding something in its clawed hand. At this distance it looked like a doll. The doll was flailing and struggling. It was wearing a blue uniform.

Then the monster lifted up its hand and took a bite.

Samus ran. The edge of the dome was right here, the thick flexible material almost fully transparent. It was covered with small holes and rips, rips that were slowly spreading as the higher pressure air of the colony kept flowing out. Samus didn't remember even touching it, but then she was outside the dome. Dust and gravel shifted under her feet. It was so cold.

She'd been on trips out of the colony before, once for safety training and once with her class. They'd ridden in a bus for fifteen minutes to go look at a waterfall. The teacher had talked about terraforming. But they'd always made the kids wear atmosphere suits. She didn't have that now, only the emergency hood. Her fingers hurt so badly, every bit of her skin was burning with cold. Then she tripped as she tried to run up the rough and broken stone of a low hill. Her hands were bloody but they didn't hurt any worse than they had before.

She didn't know why she was running. Her head was ringing and she couldn't think. She couldn't scream. Every breath came in in rough and ragged gulps as her chest heaved in and out. Then she fell again. Her legs weren't working right. She was so tired. She got up and ran again down the other side of the hill, but her ankle was weak under her and she stumbled, half spinning as she struggled to stay upright. She could just see the top of the city dome over the hill. The huge black ship was hovering over it as smaller craft swarmed like a cloud of flies. Then she turned away and ran again, into the burning cold and the pain.

Finally, past empty roads and rough hills, Samus reached the point where she couldn't run anymore. She couldn't feel anything in her limbs other than a distant and tingling pain. Her legs were too weak, they wouldn't lift when she told them too. The little indicator on her hood was orange now. It was supposed to be green. Samus fell down. The rocks were rough and so cold. They poked her bones. She couldn't stand up. She couldn't think. She just lay there, chest heaving as the orange indicator on the hood slowly darkened into red. She looked back into the distance and watched the dark ships above the dome come back together and together rose up into the sky. Then they were gone. They left behind only smoke. Smoke drifting up to make clouds.

Time didn't pass. Samus couldn't think enough for it to. The only thought she had was when she realized that she was dying. She wondered what that was like.

A shadow fell over her. Samus saw the shadow and it meant nothing. Then there was a other shadow beside it and it meant nothing too. They were tall. They wore long robes. There was a face with a beak. Like a bird. Samus liked birds. She couldn't breath.

Then two huge hands reached down to scoop up the small child and held her cradled between them. The child's eyes closed.

...

Samus woke up looking at the dark blue sky of L-4M. Her vision was blurry and spotted until her eyes refocused and she realized that her helmet visor was coated with dust. She lay on her back, finding safety in her suit's embrace.

So, she was alive.

Data blinked across her visor. It corrected her to indicate that she was in fact barely alive. She'd been unconscious for eleven hours as the suit tried to repair the damage to itself and her. Samus' bones were reinforced beyond breaking but even the flexible structural lattice infused throughout her entire body had only been just enough to prevent her organs from being reduced to liquid from that deorbiting impact. Medical nannites had been at work in her brain, ameliorating the massive trauma, while the suit took over most of her blood processing from her involuntarily detached lungs, liver, and gut. Even so it had been close.

The suit did not have many resources left to work with. The list of missing hardware systems, all cannibalized by direct energy conversion to soften the impact, was still scrolling past Samus' eyes. Correction, to soften the _impacts_. Apparently, she'd hit the ground six times. Primary impact, blasted through the top of a hill, bounced off flat ground, hit a canyon wall, hit another canyon wall, then landed here. Samus now noticed that her view of the sky was bounded in one direction by rock. Oh, she was in a canyon. She turned her head and saw a precipitous drop. Halfway down the wall of a canyon. Her left hand hung out over air.

A warning message flashed in front of her eyes as Samus slowly sat up, the Chozo text advising against moving more than absolutely necessary. It would be another nineteen hours before the biological repairs were completely finished. Samus, gestured with her free hand, accessing the menus to reduce the anesthetic delivery. She immediately experienced a measure of regret but it was necessary. She needed to be sharp.

The damage to the suit was visually obvious. The bulging shoulder mounted Varia components were gone, as were all her booster jets, and her arm cannon was now at least ten percent slimmer. The suit shield generators were basically nonexistent. Everything had been reabsorbed to keep her alive through that one moment. She was as weak a newborn baby. Well, a newborn baby still strapped into the most advanced suit of power armor ever created in this galaxy, even in its current reduced state.

Samus sighed, and then once again regretted reducing the anesthetic. Time to get to work. She'd repaired the suit before. Many times before. Chozo wartech was sturdy. It just needed ingredients. Certain rare elements it was unable to synthesize for some specialized systems, and for the rest just power. Lots of power. She could do that.

She then realized that she had been sitting here on this bit of dusty rock for several minutes without processing a single thing about her surroundings. That sort of thing got people killed. Maybe she'd overestimated the extent to which her brain damage had been repaired.

She was lying on a rock ledge three-quarters of the way down the sun bathed wall of a deep canyon. In fact it was exceptionally deep for how narrow it was, the rim was several hundred feet above her. The suit scan revealed that while most of the planet's land at these latitudes was barren of all life but a type of lichen-analogue, these canyons preserved inside them a denser and warmer atmosphere. That certainly explained why the floor down below was almost pure dark green.

Samus grabbed hold of the edge of the rock ledge with her left hand and lowered herself down as far as that took her. The human colony was connected to this same canyon network, she'd seen it as she fell. She descended the cliff face, kicking new footholds in the rock when geology didn't comply, and tried to avoid the wall-clinging vines that grew more numerous and thicker the lower she got. The vegetation was dark here, the thin needlelike leaves almost black with pigment. They needed every bit sunlight and heat they could get here, day couldn't last long at the bottom of of a narrow canyon.

Then Samus reached the end of her climb and dropped the last thirty feet to the dirt packed floor. The canyon was only about twenty feet across by this point, and there was a little strip of sand in the very middle, probably an intermittent stream. The native plants were fairly dense here, but still Samus found a narrow path near the far wall that made for easy walking. It was some sort of track, although made by what type of creature she didn't know. In any case it would serve her now, and lead her downstream to the mouth of this canyon. She began to walk faster. She'd noticed that she was not receiving any transmissions from the colony anymore, nor from Diomedes above. It was possible that she was simply shielded by the geology here but she was still very nervous. Garbled Pirate transmissions drifting straight down indicated that the splinter fleet still had an orbital presence to some degree. It was possible that the fight was still ongoing. She hoped so.

Walking gave her time to think and so her left hand worked in air, accessing virtual menus as Samus attempted to get the suit systems to load up what they could of Adam's personality. There was anesthetic in her brain, she needed a second voice to help help her plan. However, nearly instantly a message flashed in front of her eyes, " _Integration Failed_ ". Too many of Adam's core thought programs were missing even if most of his memory was safe. Samus breathed out. There were backups back on Diomedes of course, but not down here. Still, she set the suit to use some spare cycles attempting to grow an integration framework for Adam off in a virtual partition. She missed his silence too.

Leaves rustled and Samus' right arm snapped up to target the noise. Edging sideways, she tapped her temple, remembered that all her advanced vision modes had been cannibalized, and then knelt down to peer under the shivering bush. There was a small creature frozen back there, its round back covered with thin feather-like quills and its four eyes were wide and black. Scan said it was a common herbivore native to the planet's northern canyon lands; not endangered at all. It watched Samus, not daring to move but ready to sprint if she moved any closer. Samus' shield energy indicator quietly blinked red in the corner of her vision, reminding her of her dire straights.

She sighed and her power beam fired once. The shield meter ticked up slightly as a little limp form bounced off the far stone wall. She was here to protect thousands of sapient colonists from a Space Pirate attack that could still be under way. She needed every resource. Samus stood up and walked down the narrow path in the direction of the colony city.

After a few minutes she rounded a bend and, pushing past a small twisted tree, she saw that up above her the canyon briefly closed in a massive stone arch. The suit scan suggested that most of these canyons were originally ancient lava tubes from the volcanic mountain range nearby. This planet clearly had a very energetic past. In any case Samus now walked in the shade.

Then she emerged into the sunlight on the far side of the arch and almost kicked the back of a standing stone slab. It was polished, rectangular and clearly sapient made. Samus walked around it and looked down at words carved in neat Human Standard.

" _Whistle Canyon Nature Park: Please stay on the trail_ "

She now felt a slight bit more guilty about the little creature. Well, it wasn't the first time Samus had been a poacher. Still, it didn't help that a little speaker by the sign for some reason misinterpreted her power suit's signature as a third grade class trip and was now cooing a recorded message about the water cycle and the importance of conserving local wildlife. Samus moved on, towards the simple metal wall stood across the canyon mouth a few yards beyond. The door in the middle had a simple low energy barrier across it, just enough to discourage any local wildlife from clawing at it. A little tap panel sat in the wall beside it, allowing any locals easy access back and forth.

Samus shot the door.

It sprang open with an electric squeal of protest as the energy field broke. Strictly speaking she could have just tapped the access pad with her finger or the touched door itself to let the suit scan do the rest but shooting also worked. She liked when shooting worked.

Then Samus stepped though the door onto a wide shelf occupied by a small paved parking lot as on each side the canyon walls raced apart into the distance. Below her lay the sprawling white and blue buildings of the colony city nestled in a wide valley. A few strands of smoke rose from the far distant edge but that was the only motion. The city was silent. Her suit scan picked up no free radio transmissions. No vehicles moved in the streets. As Samus' breath caught in the terrible stillness, even the orbital Pirate transmissions faded off the spectrum, hidden as they fell behind the planet. There was only silence and the distant sound of reverberating wind in the canyons like faint and sorrowful music.

Suddenly a new transmission alert appeared on her visor. A distant human signal emerged from the planet horizon and slowly pierced through the atmospheric static.

"...is GFS Diomedes. Colony L-4M. We've completed another orbit and are back in range. Continue Aurora, what's going on down there? Report!"

...


	6. Silent Streets

...

Samus stood at the edge of a parking lot carved into the side of the canyon wall, looking down at the silent colony city that spread out in the wide valley before her. The valley was a nexus below where three particularly large canyons met, all leading down from the general northern direction of the preposterously tall mountain that loomed in the distance. Through the thin, clear air Samus could clearly see the massive statue of the Chozo carved into that rocky cliffside staring down at her and the entire human city below her. On three sides of the city the valley's steep natural walls shot up to the high altitude volcanic tablelands above, while to the south the depression spread and widened out into the hazy distance of the lower and warmer south. Well, warmer in a relative sense for the standards of this planet.

The glass-studded buildings that characterized human habitation filled this end of the valley. For such a new colony it was an impressively large city. Samus just wished she could see a single sign of life moving down in the streets below.

The radio transmission crackled and Nakamura's voice continued to broadcast down from orbit. "Aurora, report."

Samus steeled her sinking stomach with practiced tensing as she readied for the continued silence. Then a jolt of surprise raced through her core as another transmission clicked onto the spectrum. "Aurora-926 reporting."

A breath of wind pushed past Samus as her head snapped around look up the valley. The signal was tight banded, aimed for space, and encrypted but the suit narrowed in on its origin in under a second. Far across the city at the mouth of one of the three large branching canyons there was a hulking white building, massive by the standards of this colony. It was part of a larger sprawling complex of linked multistory buildings and now as Samus focused the suit's resources she could detect a faint radiation signature of an active shield around some of it. The fight wasn't over. There were still forces resisting the Pirates' advance.

The colony's supervising computer mind continued its transmission, layering vocals over continuous data transmissions. With a faintly feminine voice it said, "Understood, Diomedes. The facility is secure. The land-bound hostiles made another attempted assault but continue to be stymied by the deployment of my emergency countermeasures. Five thousand of my charges remain secure within the facility."

Samus' left hand clenched at her side. Five thousand survivors accounted for. This colony's registry entry listed eleven thousand. Those were horrific casualties but exactly how bad the situation truly was she couldn't know. The Aurora unit and Nakamura both knew that if there were Pirates on the planet they could possibly be listening on this call just like Samus was. Then she felt the smallest trill of hope. Some of this could be false intelligence. There could be more survivors holed up somewhere less protected but more hidden. Aurora could be concealing their location. Samis had to hope that was so.

"Understood, Aurora." Nakamura sounded tired. "Hold position and protect those that remain with you. Our counterassault is delayed by repairs but the enemy has the same concerns. Orbital standoff persist. Next contact at code alpha four two nine. Diomedes out."

Samus tilted her head up as she looked through her visor past the thin wisps of clouds towards the unseen black of space. Directly above her, the optical effect of the sky faded from blue into a circle of deep purple. The atmosphere was thin. On an Earth-standard planet this air pressure would be found at approximately twelve thousand feet. Outside her suit the wind was cold.

All the Federation forces had to assume that she was dead or captured onboard the Pirate Command ship since that was her last known location. Even if her suit had been able to punch a signal up to Diomedes in its current state she would not. There was no reason to give up the possibility of a surprise attack agains the land-bound Pirate forces. The corner of her lips twitched up. In fact, she did the strike right then she could get several surprise attacks. The dead rarely reported back on who killed them.

The Aurora Unit's facility was the first place to search. The biocomputer had mentioned recently repelling an attack so there were likely to be Pirate forces still in the area. Even if there weren't she needed to make contact with the Federation and let them know she was still alive. They could fill her in on what happened during those eleven hours she had been unconscious.

Samus took off down the road from the Park trailhead's perch on the cliff side as it cut through the red and black volcanic stone of the valley wall. She made time at as fast of a jog as she could manage without impeding her body's continued healing. It only took her two minutes to make it down the canyon wall to the highest edge of the valley floor where the city began. Still there was no sign of life in between the habitation buildings and work facilities, just scraps of litter and fine grey dust blowing in the breeze. She continued down the streets, passing shop windows and delivery vehicles parked here and there. The wind moaned faintly as it caught against the corner of a multistory apartment complex.

There was clear evidence of a hurried evacuation. Broken doors, shattered windows, dropped valuables on the sidewalk, all pointed to some time in the past when a placid civilian populace was suddenly faced with pure terror for the first time in their lives. Aurora's report had suggested massive casualties but at least in this area of the city Samus could see no evidence of that. That is not to say that she saw nothing. She passed the corpse of a woman lying crumpled at the bottom of a stairwell. Scan said she had fractured her scull. Deeper in the city a man's body lay in the street, chest blackened and burt along with the few scattered blaster scars on the building behind him. But these were the exception more than the rule and that gave her hope. She had seen no sign of the colony's emergency shelters but that meant the Pirates might not have found them either.

The greater mystery was what the Pirates down here on the surface were actually doing. They were presumably trapped on the planet until Diomedes and the splinter fleet worked out who held orbital dominance. Any Pirate lander craft would be defenseless to Diomedes if the the larger ship came around for another orbit while they were still rising up out of the atmosphere. But by the same token, if the Federation had not already landed ground forces then they were not likely able to now, not after the Pirates had been given all these hours to build up anti-air defenses. The enemy certainly had the numbers to do so. Now in the depths of the colony Samus glimpsed far off shadows moving in the distance across the length of the city when once she passed a particularly long and straight boulevard. An armed lander craft had floated across that road, just barely a few yards above the pavement and well below the skyline. Then in a second the ship was hidden again, vanished into the buildings of the colony. They hadn't seen her. Those Pirates didn't act like they had military superiority here on the planet. They were being very cautious. Samus didn't know why and that made her very uneasy.

A computer device lay where it had fallen out of someone's fleeing hand onto the sidewalk. Samus bent down to pick it up and read the message that still glowed across the partially broken screen. " _Evacuation Alert: Proceed to your districts designated shelter. Reminder: Your shelter is located where the sacred Chozo ignores._ "

Samus frowned at the little rectangle before raising one eyebrow in mild respect. That last message was clearly leveraging local shared experience as an encryption code. Clever, easy for the residents to understand and nearly uncrackable for a foreign force. One point to Aurora-926. It also meant that Samus was right. There were multiple shelters and some might still be safe. The corner of Samus's visor blinked that all the devices relevant data had been downloaded so she let it fall from her hand as she moved on. It shattered on the cement at her feet.

A few blocks away she passed a minor governmental office and on an instinct lightly punched through the reinforced glass. She walk in through the easily expanded hole and set her suit scan to rip into the main public information database. That at least gave her a map of the city. A rectangular outline of a building suddenly glowed as a virtual projection behind the blank interior wall; a local police command center about a block away from her current location. It was a good place to investigate.

A minute later she rounded the end of the block and was once again faced with the reminder of why this colony existed at all. A Chozo statue sat in the middle of an open city square; its dark metal and stone standing out starkly against the glass and concrete of the human colony. Two designs, mutually alien to each other.

Samus' eyes narrowed as she began to feel a building anger at these humans daring to move a statue, for desecrating it and its creators to use as mere ornamentation. Then she got a closer look at its plinth. The way the statue jutted up from a circle punched in the center of the square clearly showed that it had been left in place and the colonists had built around it, honoring the previous residents of this world in their own ignorant way. Samus breathed out and forgot her anger, focusing in her mission once more. Being on this planet was bringing back old habits from her youth.

As she crossed the concrete expanse towards the police headquarters she passed near the statue. A crouched figure of an unarmored Chozo sat in the middle, even larger than life, with its hands held out before it as if cradling a precious burden. Those huge hands were empty though the statue's eyes still glowed with a faint orange light. On each side of the statue stood vertical stone slabs, carved with flowing Chozo script and then a network of circular symbols that even Samus didn't recognize.

She casually tapped the temple of her helmet to have the suit scan and retain the text for her to read later but a second later an odd visual glitch jumped across her visor. Samus froze in the middle of her step, however after that one strange instant nothing similar recurred. Everything looked normal, though the suit displays were still complaining about her current dreadfully weakened state. She turned back towards the statue, narrowing her eyes at its unmoving metal form. The eyes still glowed blankly in the face of a being long dead. Samus knew that her suit had suffered incredible damage in the planetfall. Frankly, it was astonishing that the thing still worked at all and all things considered, a software glitch was perfectly forgivable. However, she knew better. Despite her recent trauma she had not forgotten the strange welcome message that had popped up when her suit scanned this planet for the first time. Her Chozo built technology was reacting to this place, to this secret domain of its makers; this last fortress. This wasn't anything she'd experienced before, even on other Chozo planets. She didn't like it.

But that mystery was forced to take a lower priority to the remaining human lives currently at risk here. Samus turned back around, but not before gesturing two fingers at her eyes and then at the silent statue's, and strode across the concrete expanse towards the tall armored colony building striped in blue paint.

The righthand outbuilding of the police station was in ruins. Samus guessed that it had been the vehicle bay and so had received a quick heavy weapons barrage from the initial Pirate decent. The attackers must have wanted to stop any defense ships from being launched. However, the rest of the station seemed intact enough, including the communications array on the very top. Right now, to Samus' eyes, that was more valuable than any amount of armaments a tiny local defense force might have had. The front gate was open and a few dropped weapons showed more evidence of a disordered retreat. Grey dust collected in the corners of the enclosed compound yard.

She stepped through the unlocked front doors and an alert flashed in Samus' visor. Her gun twitched up before her mind could read it. But she calmed herself and processed the message. The weird glitches were getting to her; she was becoming afraid of her suit, her own self. Her brow furrowed as she frowned, the painkillers still in her system were dulling her thoughts. That kind of doubt was a quick way to get killed on the battlefield, even quicker if there was actually a reason for that doubt.

" _ALERT: upgrade materials detected_ "

An orange icon blinked through the far wall, indicating something hiding in the near distance behind it, somewhere in the station. Samus walked through the deserted police office, ignoring a lone security scan system beeping futile as it noticed her armaments. She pushed past desks and waiting areas, walking down an undamaged grey hallway as she searched for the door to the material alert location. The locals had completely abandoned this location without a ground fight. Samus didn't have a full picture yet of what had happened while she was unconscious, but there would have had to have been a damn good reason to desert this building, even with the light damage it had sustained. This should have been a prime Pirate looting target, she thought as she passed a half stocked armory. Or the disordered retreat could have been simple panic and incompetence, but all the same Samus' eyes were thin and suspicious as she swept her head from left to right, taking in the signs of hurried evacuation.

Then she casually thew a door open and heard it clunk firmly against metal. Samus blinked as she looked through the doorway and found herself staring slightly up at a large security robot with a large police shield symbol printed across its armored torso.

It was as loud as it was large. "This area is restricted! Vacate immediately or you will be forcibly restrained!" Then in a split second it alternated to a tone of geniality as its programing switched tracks. "No registration detected. Please, citizen, display your hardcopy registration or accompany me to the nearest station to speak with a human representative."

Samus kept an eye on the security bot's menacing arms and heavy tank treads as she leaned to the side to confirm what she already regretted. The rest of the empty hallway proved it, the detected upgrade materials were inside the robot. Samus sighed. Right now it looked to be in much better repair than she was. Luckily, the robot was confused enough by her suit's scan resistance to not notice the obviously visible weapon enveloping her right arm.

"This area is restricted! Vacate at once! If you require assistance with a faulty registration transmitter I can contact a technical aid representative. It is my pleasure to serve."

Samus slowly backed up as the heavy robot rolled after her, both aiming a stun gun with one limb and in the other cheerfully holding out a blinking communication line. Whoever did budgeting for the local police had certainly cheaped out on the AI model here. In fact, now that she focused on the some of those large parts, the whole thing looked like a repurposed construction robot. It was just an upright cylinder in treads outfitted with four heavy duty multipurpose arms and not much else. But apparently it's power core contained the transuranic alloys that Samus needed right now.

"Comply immediately, or face the consequences! Have a nice day."

Samus' weapon rose in a slow smooth motion at the same time as a security bot arm unfolded to reveal a powerful organic destabilizer. Samus sighed; why could nothing she needed ever just be laying on a table?

A few minutes later, the smoking and sparking security bot bore enough hammer-like powerbeam impact marks to resemble an abstract art product. The entire first floor of the police station was strewn with debris, pieces of broken cubical walls and shattered plastic-wood desks. Black scorch marks covered the sturdier walls. Samus stood over the fallen robot with one foot planted on it's ripped metal torso, panting as her weapon remained trained on its now exposed core.

The synthesized voice continued, "Lethal force autho-autho-authorized! Would you like to rate your experience today?"

Samus grunted as she leaned down to grab and rip the necessary component from the chattering wreckage. Her weakened shields and armaments meant she had needed to be a lot more acrobatic in that fight than she might have preferred as the owner of a set of still healing organs. Light glowed around her hand as the Chozo suit began absorb the materials it needed. Then a new alert flashed in her visor; this time mercifully green.

 _"Charge beam functionality restored_ "

Well, that was one down.

Following one of the sturdier looking undamaged walls, Samus located a stairwell up to the building's less public offices. Soon she found a secure terminal on the second floor and jabbed her arm at it to gain physical access. Then it was just a matter of waiting a few moments for the Diomedes' orbit to come around again.

Time elapsed and the signal lanced up, wrapped up in Federation code and Chozo system sorcery that disguised it as the same format as Aurora's last message. It would look like a duplicate message unless the recipient possessed the handshake program Samus had made the suit leave in Diomedes' computers. No one but that particular ship would know that this was Samus and not another bio-computer message, particularly the Pirate ground forces. In fact, Samus had actually left that ship with a few other instructions in addition to the handshake program.

Contact was established and Diomedes replied with an automatic hail as it rerouted her call. Then a hesitant and confused female voice spoke from the other end.

"Er, this is Officer Yin? Who...how am I even getting an outside call?"

Samus smiled. She'd almost forgotten she'd set this up. The Federation had the nerve to arrest her for saving them from the X-parasite so she was going to be very nice and compliant with the law. And that meant all calls went through her parol officer, even if the Federation in no way wanted them to.

"This is Samus Aran reporting in on my commuted service sentence. Status: damaged but operational after eleven hours unconscious. Hi, Yin."

"Ms Aran?!" Yin's voice came back, astonished. "How...Um, hi to you too?"

The communication line suddenly clicked as Samus' reroute protocol was forcibly overridden. A rather angry voice replaced Yin's disoriented one. Apparently, Commander Nakamura did not appreciate Samus' interpretation of the terms of her sentencing.

"Aran! You're alive?! Why are you talking to some...?!" However, he quickly gained control of himself and became serious again. "You know what, never mind. There's not much time on this orbit. Damnit, you're down in the colony city? Ok, we can use that." He breathed in and out. "Eleven hours, and you've seen nothing. Well, let's catch you up. Aurora-926 is in the central Federation Research Facility and is under intermittent attack from Pirate ground forces. While you're down there, coordinate an offense with 926. Transmitting a hard-wire communication point and a path for you to get there. Acknowledge orders."

Samus snorted slightly at the formality as she leaned back, standing in front of the computer terminal as she looked at the blank wall behind the inactive holo display. Once words like that had been hammered through even her stubborn reflexes, but she hadn't been in the military for decades. Still, Nakamura was a sensible man. And she had a colony to save. She flicked her thumb and the suit transmitted a confirmation signal.

" _Acknowledged_ "

While the audio signal still lasted Samus could hear Nakamura breathing. There was a strain under his attempt at projecting forceful command. Then he sighed. "Repairs to Diomedes are underway. Do what you can on the surface to push back the Pirate forces. Listen to Aurora and we can keep any more valuable technology out of their hands. We'll be back in the fight soon. Until then, happy hunting." The last word vanished into static. The transmission terminated as the ship once more fell beneath the horizon.

True to his word, a new destination marker offered itself in Samus' visor, off in the distance at the head of the valley where the space split into three narrower canyons. The access point was at the edge of that large Research Station complex Samus had seen as soon as she got her first view of the colony. She glanced at the map overlay the suit displayed as she trotted back down the stairs, It would take her about twenty minutes to get there on foot if she didn't run into any hostile patrols on the way. She stepped out through the front doors into the courtyard that was still littered with scattered weapons, armor plates and the fine grey dust that covered everything in this city.

A sound whistled across the sky and Samus jerked into motion in the exact same second that her suit flashed a warning in her eyes. She'd heard enough missiles launching in atmosphere to have burned the reflex down into her bones. But as she spun behind cover, raising her gun to find an incoming target, she got a view and relaxed as quickly as she had tensed. Three large-bodied rockets had been gently lobbed up from the far outer edge of the city where the pirate landing party seemed to be concentrating but Samus didn't need the suit's dotted trajectory lines to know that they were going to miss her current position by quite a lot. What she was interested to learn was that the suit was sensing life signs within each of the ballistic canisters.

The Pirates were firing live payloads? Why?

The three crude missiles arced overhead and then fell down to vanish behind the city's skyline. Samus frowned. Those things each landed a bit apart, two in the canyon behind the Research Center complex and one a little deeper in the city on that same side of the colony. There was no sound of any distant detonation, only a return to the unnatural silence. The only sound was the same low tones that the wind played through the canyon mouths. Some sort of commando troop insertion? Maybe, but Pirates favored squad tactics and they should have clustered that kind of landing. And who did they need to move around that they couldn't use their ships for? Samus remembered that Pirate patrol she'd glimpsed in the distance, a lander craft traveling just barely above the street pavement. Somehow the local defense force had made the invaders afraid of the skies. Some sort of powerful anti-air? Was that the "emergency countermeasures" Aurora had mentioned?

She glanced up at the dark blue sky with unease. Samus needed to get in contact with the Aurora unit. It would have the answers she needed because right now all she had were suspicions and a leaden feeling in her gut. A quick motion of her hand and she called up a view of the city map. A crooked orange line marked out the path Nakamura had given her to the hardwired Aurora access node. It ran in a direct line through the city streets before curling around the outside of the vast Research Center campus.

However, there was a shorter path. Nakamura's computer had plotted a route that avoided things like secure research areas Samus had nothing resembling clearance for. She looked up the gently sloping street where the valley narrowed around her. The Research Center was a massive sprawling complex of hulking buildings that stretched across two of the three canyon mouths that formed the end of this valley. The web of connected facilities had campus protrusions jutting out into the city in may places, showing both the continuous construction and the fact that this Center clearly had more power than the city. The city map confirmed that there should actually be a path to her marked destination that stayed inside that web of connected facilities. That would allow her to stay out of sight of the Pirates until she managed to repair her suit more and gain some intelligence on what was actually happening on this planet.

Her journey through the city was suspiciously easy. Nakamura had made it sound like there was an active ground war going on down here, but Samus did not even see a single Pirate patrol. Only, silence, broken glass, and dust. Up ahead the tall sturdy wall of the Research Center campus rose to mark the terminus of the road.

One of those Pirate missiles had landed somewhere nearby on the far side of this bit of the facility grounds. Samus' gun began to angle itself towards every doorway and shadow that she passed, waiting for some unknown attack. But instead, as if cued by her thoughts, the suit began to pick up a renewed round of transmissions from the orbiting Pirate forces. There was not much information Samus could glean from them through this fleet's still curiously advanced encryption, but she did noticed the prolific abasements in the message headings. Her brow lowered as her watchful stare became a glare. She recognized when Pirates talked like that. That kind of language meant Ridley was down here on the planet, receiving those transmissions from his terrified orbit crew. It was all the more reason to make contact with the Auroroa unit and complete the repairs to her suit.

Samus turned her attention away from the sky and resumed concentrating on making her way stealthily down these deserted streets when the suit's transmission monitoring suddenly beeped an alert of total defeat in the encryption war. A new dense burst of data was streaming down from the orbiting Pirate forces above, but that was not what made Samus freeze and look up wide eyed into the violet tinged path to space. Her suit couldn't crack the meaning of this transmission, but it recognized the format far too easily. Its signature was that of pure Chozo technology. And it was talking to something down here on the planet. Samus had destroyed the cube, but she had missed something. What had they found deep out in space. And what did it have to do with here?

This gate into the Research campus was an easy fifteen foot vertical jump, clearly designed more to dissuade than to bar. Inside, huge sturdy buildings stood amid carefully arranged planters of local flora. Off in the distance, still a ways off, Samus could see the largest building that had to be the main control center. The subtle shield signature her suit picked up spelled out that it was where Aurora was huddled with her 5,000 remaining charges. That was where Samus was heading. Then a sound rang in the air. Samus snapped her head back to see the dots of more rocket burners rising into the air. The Pirates were at it again, whatever they were doing. Samus decided to get inside.

The front entrance to this nearest building was locked but the armored glass on each side of the door gave way soon enough. Inside, Samus grabbed the nearest important looking computer and let her suit's hacking rip out a floor plan for this place, plotting a path to Aurora that didn't expose her to Pirates launching unknown payloads down on her head. Then she turned and walked in the direction the building's designers least wanted an intruder to go.

The armored security door blinked out angry red messages, bright in the dim interior light. Then Samus' suit scan brushed against the classified systems and those firewalls crumpled too. The door slid open with a soft hiss. Samus noted the flow of air; a slight negative pressure inside, sucking atmosphere deeper into the building. So, fear of something escaping rather than fear of contamination. That indicated that the scientists weren't worrying about something delicate but rather they studying something they didn't understand or that they didn't control. Weren't they always.

Samus walked through the dimly lit white walled corridor. Under the emergency power protocols, the only light came from the widely spaced emergency labels for doors and exits. Heavy doors to experimental lab rooms slid open as she passed them, all yielding clearance to the suit scan. Each new room revealed more Chozo artifacts, sometimes accompanied by the knocked over chairs and dropped tools of the panicked evacuation. Samus wasn't surprised by the artifacts, after all that was why the colony had been established in the first place. It was also no longer surprising that the scientists had been so cautious about what was inside this place. Until the Pirates arrived, attempting to operate Chozo machinery without a manual would likely have been the most dangerous activity on this planet.

Deeper inside the facility Samus passed larger lab strewn with disassembled Chozo technology surrounded by the lab's own devices. Thick power conduits snaked off to vanish into the walls while above color coded pipes carried unknown fluids. One of them shimmered with a faint coat of frozen condensation and slowly falling fog. Suit scan ripped free encoded research documents but Samus didn't have time to red them all. The few snippets that flashed in front of her eyes referenced the scientists trying to uncover the origins of an ancient weapon project. Of course they were. However, a glance at the materials and degrees of corrosion also revealed that these Chozo devices hailed from what had to be a thousand year plus spread of history. The previous owners had been on this planet for a long time. But then they left, like they left everywhere else.

The silence was beginning to bother Samus. She was getting close to the rendezvous point with Aurora but she still had yet to see a single sign of life in this vast Research Center. The next abandoned lab chamber held a row of large metallic canisters of obvious Chozo design. They were all open and empty. One of the researcher's computer displays was still active, projecting a magnified view of a slab of Chozo engravings up onto a blank white wall. Samus didn't need the annotated translation to read what it said.

" _Behold and stand amazed, our most terrible instrument strikes forth, though not loosed by our hand. Hear its approach, travelers who tread on our bones. Fear its hunger, for within it are multitudes and evolution is its constant. Marvel at its creation, on a far distant planet for far stranger prey. And weep for those who unleash it here, for this tomb shall be the cradle of its apotheosis._ "

Samus felt a faint shiver wash down her back as she walked back out into the long main hallway. The Chozo were her people as much as humanity was, but she had no illusions about either's ability to make mistakes. Both races had a history soaked in blood and monstrous invention. And the Chozo had the greater guilt by being able to dimly forsee what would become of their actions and yet still proceeding. Her eyes narrowed as she continued her path through the tangled passages of the Research Station. She wondered what those long departed Chozo had seen here when they peered into the future. What new monster nurtured their guilt? Was it another damaged creation like Mother Brain, or corrupted machines like Elisia, or a shortsighted sin of unimaginable proportions like their single greatest failure, the-

A harsh distant sound ripped through the still, breathless air. The terrible screech crashed off the walls, thrashed through echoing corridors, and ripped through trembling ventilation ducts. Samus was already running, legs pumping in her frantic face down the hallways as her heart pounded violently in her ears like not even Ridley had managed to inspire. That sound was like crackling electricity, and shearing metal, and burning atmosphere. It was the sound of a voracious hunger without a mouth. Samus knew that sound. She knew the fear it inspired. It was the call of a metroid.

...


	7. Hunters

...

It was dark, with only a dim orange glow separating sight from blindness. Samus woke up breathing heavily, her heart pounding in her ears. She was lying on her side, curled into a loose ball at the bottom of this wide, fabric lined bowl. The glowing transparent lid that lay over it might have been claustrophobic but this place had been made to house someone far larger than a six year old girl. She wouldn't have to wait long. They always let her out soon after she woke.

Samus' chest continued to thud but she didn't move. She just stayed lying on her side, only her open eyes proving that she was awake. Even those eyes didn't move, focused on a single spot of dark purple fabric so near to her face. It wasn't any articulate thought that held her still, just a fear so pervasive and ill defined that it didn't even register as an emotion anymore. Thought was not relevant to survival, so Samus refused to think. She just shut down.

The glowing energy canopy stretched above her bed. It was orange, and round, like the colony dome at sunset. Her home. But that was gone. Far away.

A dark shape moved in the stone hall outside the nest. Samus saw it in the corner of her eye but she remained still. Then the orange glow blinked out, and the dark shape remained.

The force of watchful eyes pressed down on Samus' back so she sat up. It was hard to rise, everything felt heavier here. With the canopy gone her lungs were already starting to tingle with discomfort. But there it was, a huge hand with long fingers, holding out a pale green mask. Samus leaned forward and let the hand press the mask against her face. For a moment it cupped her mouth and nose and then something about the mask changed and she could barely feel it anymore, only a slight pressure on her face and she could breath freely again.

The tall dark shape drew back its hand and stood up. It was very tall. Samus' eyes were adjusting to the shadows and she looked up at the looming figure. Dim yellow eyes stared down back at her. She recognized the grey feathers under that hood; like a bird that had gotten old. The other one of them was more brown.

The old bird made a soft clack with its beak as it stepped back. Samus got onto her hands and knees and crawled up the soft fabric rim of the bowl bed. If she didn't then those hands would reach down and grab her; gentle but so very strong as it lifted her. But she moved on her own and in a moment she sat on the rim with her feet against the far edge of the nest that sloped down to the ground. She was already breathing heavier again. Everything was so hard to do here, it felt like her body was filled with bricks. As she steeled herself Samus noticed her chest was hurting again today, despite the mask on her face. That was bad. That meant they would put her back in the tank soon.

Samus slid down to the floor and pushed herself up into standing. The old bird watched her, so tall that Samus only tended to look at dark brown robes around its knees. Then without a word it turned and walked away down the dimly lit stone passage. Samus followed, her feet awkwardly heavy against the weathered floor. Walking was cold, they hadn't given her back her shoes. Samus looked up at the huge figure walking before her. She couldn't see its legs under the robes, but she thought that it might be taking very short steps to help her keep pace. Samus kept her head down and continued walking through the shadows.

They passed a room full of machines that Samus didn't understand and then the old bird suddenly stopped. For a moment its tall back was still and then the old bird trembled with a harsh cough. Samus watched it. They had been coughing more lately. She had an idea that it was the air. When they first brought her in here the air had stung her eyes as well as her lungs. Now it was better, but the birds had started coughing sometimes. She wondered if they went into the tank too.

Then the old bird continued on and soon they walked into the bright room. It was only bright in comparison to the other places here but still Samus had to squint her eyes as she took her heavy steps inside. The stone walls were very very tall, and somewhere so far up that it hurt Samus' neck to look that high there was a window, one that let down a thick shaft of warm yellow light.

Samus looked around and saw the other bird standing by the round metal cabinets that filled one wall of the room. The old bird stopped walking near entrance and Samus continued on across the open space. There was a corner of this room that the birds had made soft. There was a cloth-like a rug on the floor, there were small things to sit on, and a thick board set on the ground that Samus could use as a table. Samus reached the little metal block she used as a chair and sat down on the folded cloth someone had put on top of it. She tried to not look like she was panting as the other bird walked over and set a small deep-walled bowl on the wooden slab in front of her. Then it tapped the green mask on her face and it slid off easily, before being set set down on the low slab next to the bowl. For a moment, Samus didn't move, just feeling the faint burning in her lungs again, but the robed figure standing over her reached out its huge hand again and gestured to the bowl.

" _Kektayok'd_."

Samus reached out and grabbed the bowl with both hands, bringing it up to her lips so she could suck out some of the warm tan mush inside. The bird above her made another noise, a vague grunt that Samus didn't think was a word even in their language. This one spoke a lot more than the other. In fact for the first few days Samus had thought that only one of them had a voice.

She continued eating as she silently watched them move about the room. Or at least she watched the Voice, the old bird was soon gone again. She rarely saw them both at the same time. At first she had not known how many there really were; before she learned to recognize them it seemed like there could be hundreds of the creatures. It had been terrifying. In those days she'd been trying to escape, imagining finding the ship that she dimly remembered seeing the inside of when she woke in pain with cold burns on her skin and tears in her eyes. But every time she wandered away here she only found more dimly lit stone rooms or huge metal doors she couldn't open. Then she would turn around and one of the birds would be standing there, silent and strong like statues dressed in robes. It was ok that she failed though, Samus didn't know anywhere else she could go to. Her home was dead.

So she when she finished eating her food and pressed the mask back on her face she just sat on her little seat and watched Voice do whatever tasks occupied his time. These feathers weren't grey like the other bird's but from what Samus could see of his head and forearms there seemed to be fewer, exposing wrinkled grey skin below. She guessed he was a boy, because she knew boy adults went bald sometimes. Well, people did, so she supposed birds could too.

As Samus watched Grey Voice wave his hands on the other side of the room to summon of a glowing web of alien letters floating in the air, she wondered why she didn't feel afraid any more. She just felt tired, and empty. She wondered if fear was something you could use up, and if you spent too much time feeling it then you never could feel it again. She hoped that was true. Then maybe the nightmares would stop soon. She didn't want to dream of smoke and wind and the shadows of wings anymore.

But then, even if it was hard to walk, Samus couldn't sit still for any longer. She got up slowly, keeping an eye on Grey Voice's back as he continued to conduct the orange symphony in the air before him. Not having shoes was cold on her feet, but it made her quiet. Samus slipped out of the room.

The string of connected stone halls here were tall and they were endless. Samus thought that this place might be underground, she had only ever seen the one window. She walked down empty passages, her feet making soft claps on the smooth floors that echoed off the silent walls. She thought that there were supposed to be more people here. The room where she slept had eight of those nest beds, though all but hers were always dark and empty. Most of the chambers she poked her head into were shadowed and dusty, filled with metal machines that glowed with dim lights like they were in a deep sleep from which they might never awake. Samus touched her hand to a painted wall, tracing her fingers around the feet of a bird person painted there. This wall stretched down into the distance and every inch was covered with those images, an endless row of silent images. There had been a lot more people here once.

Then Samus came up against another one of the metal doors that blocked her way. Her face didn't even come up half way on it. She lowered her brow as she stared at it and the thin film of glowing white energy covering the metal plates. You couldn't touch it with your skin, it shocked you. Throwing rocks at it didn't work either. But she knew they opened. Days ago she'd seen Old Bird down a hall as Grey Voice was taking her back to bed. He had been standing in front of a door like this, but after Samus passed out of sight she had heard the sound of metal sliding and a brief hiss of pressurized air.

She wandered away from the door, back into one of the many abandoned rooms filled with machinery. It was all so quiet. Grey Voice would notice she was gone soon. Then one item caught her eye, sitting on a table like surface by itself. It looked like a hollow metal hand. It looked like one of the bird people's hands. Samus had an idea.

Then she tried to lift the hand and she began thinking that her idea might not have been so smart after all. Things were so heavy here, and the hand was very big. It toppled to the ground with a loud clang. But Samus was not about to give up just because she realized her genius might actually be stupidity. She discovered that when she managed to lift the gauntlet up by the wrist and planted her feet firmly she could drag it along the floor. It made a horrible scraping noise that echoed down the halls but she could move it. Walking backwards and straining her tired arms she managed to to bring the hand to the door, always looking up to see if either of the bird people were racing down to grab her. Her panting made the inside of the facemask fill with uncomfortable moisture but the hall behind her was still empty. Then she reached down, got a grip, strained, and lifted the gauntlet up to touch the door.

The energy barrier disappeared and a breeze blew past Samus' hair as the door opened. Outside was something new. Samus stepped through the door.

If the previous places she had seen on this world were _empty_ then this new cavern was certainly _abandoned_. Cracks had appeared in the stone and the moisture that dripped down had brought with it life, spreading out in waves of colonization. Samus edged around the fungus-like vegetation, looking out at the lawn of tiny stalks which glowed blue at their tips, casting a tint on everything like the tunnel was underwater. It was cold, and the stone sucked heat out of her through her bare feet. Then another color of light added to the milieu and Samus turned back to realize that the energy barrier had sprung back on the metal door. She had left the gauntlet inside. That was bad.

She gripped her hands into little fists at her side. Well, there was nothing she could do about that. If she wanted to get back she'd just have to find another way. Her eyes were starting to sting, like the old air had done before. It was very cold. Her body began to tremble, shivers rattling her bones as her feet burned where they touched the bare ground. But as she squinted against the pain, her eyes had adjusted just enough to see a faint light further down this tunnel, one that had a comforting warm glow to it. Samus kept her hands clenched as she began to walk.

When she bashed her toes against a sharp rock it only added a deeper pain on top of the numb burning that was already spreading across her exposed skin. When her hair brushed her face it stung. But Samus recognized the color of sunlight whose indirect glow painted that rough wall ahead. If there was an opening to the sun it would be warmer there and she could plan her next move. She kept her eyes focused on that promise of light as she carefully made her way past a broken fissure in the floor, a dark chasm that led down into some more natural cavern. There were distant noises down there, sounds like clicking scissors. Samus began to move faster.

Her jaw began to hurt from how tightly clenched she kept it to prevent her teeth from bouncing off each other in her building shivers. Shivering didn't make her feel any warmer, it just made important things harder to do. She wished she could stop it once and for all, just like the fear. She'd traveled quite a ways now, this tunnel was longer than she'd thought. The noises behind her were getting closer; scraping noises like claws on rock, climbing up from below.

Then Samus was running, clumsy bare feet jabbing down on broken rock. She stumbled, scraped, and bled but then she was up again and still running. There were thumps behind her, the sound of something jumping and then scrabbling and then jumping again, all the while filling the tunnel with the echoing sound of its heavy wet breathing. Samus noticed a second, shrill and muffled noise mixing with the air in pulses that timed with her own frantic panting and then she realized that she was screaming. It was a horse, weak scream that clawed its way out with each breath she shoved out of her lungs, a sound born only to strangle in the space of her little mask. The thing was going to catch her. She hadn't even seen it but it was coming. With every time Samus' foot slammed down onto the rock her mind supplied the imagined feeling of claws cutting into her back, weight bearing her down the the ground, and teeth around her neck. So she ran.

Then she reached the end of the tunnel and her fingertips scraped at the rock as the flung herself around the corner towards the color of daylight. Shafts of blazing light cut down from above and it was so bright it blinded her. Samus threw an arm up over her eyes and in that same moment she tripped. But when she fell it was onto a soft surface, a spongy mat of course fibers, and when she opened her eyes she lay on green moss in a pool of light. There was a trail of red behind her. She looked down and saw that her feet were bleeding. More blood trickled down from her knees.

A loud thump pounded from the dark tunnel. Samus could barely see though the shadows anymore; the sunlight had stolen her vision. But there was a shape creeping forward there, strange and terrible. She saw two huge legs that arced up like those of spiders, and teeth in a grasping mouth that hung below. Samus sent silent screams at her leaden limbs, pushing herself back as she crawled along the ground. The creature briefly shied away, it didn't like the light. But it was hungry and so it took a step forward, claws piercing into the pale shaft of day.

Every muscle in Samus' body ached with tension as they surged like wound springs, but she knew in some primal part of her that she couldn't keep this up. Any of these movements might be the last she had strength for. And then, through the bitter burning cold that surrounded her, a new shiver passed across the back of her neck. Slowly, driven by a sense other than thought, Samus turned her head away from the hungry breast.

A massive metal statue sat crouched at the end of the cavern, a cyclopean watcher amid this mossy ruin. It looked a little like the birds who had captured her. A dimly glowing orb the size of a human torso was clutched in its long fingered hands but as Samus turned to behold it, a building flame rushed up from somewhere deep within the metal plates. The statue's eyes ignited red. It saw her.

And it was angry.

A trembling spread through the ground as the statue shifted its torso, like the planet itself was quaking in fear. Then, with glacial speed and power, the statue stood up. It was shaped like the bird people, but stronger, plated in armor and a head that was only reduced to a single slit of burning red eyes. Samus knew she needed to move but she was paralyzed in place. Her mouth was open but she didn't even breath. Back at the mouth of the cavern the beast roared in anxiety, bouncing back and forth across the line of shadow as its stomach fought with its fear. The ground was shaking but it smelled blood and so the decision was made. With a harsh shriek the creature leaped forward.

The movements of the statue were slow but unending. In a single smooth continuum it let go of the precious orb with one hand, and that arm unfolded outwards with curious slowness. But that powerful motion traveled down each joint from shoulder, to elbow, to wrist, building like a wave approaching the shore. The long metal fingers unfolded in the same deceptive grace. They brushed through the air and then met the path of the leaping beast in midair. Viscera splashed against the far wall. A thin mist of blood sparkled in the sunbeams.

Samus let out a breathless yelping shriek as the predator's body smashed down beside her, green blood pulsing out of the mortal rent as it trashed in the confusion and shock of its final heartbeats. Its other leg fell down across from her, severed. The statue was still moving and its feet slowly crunched against the stone as it turned to face the on the girl before it. Samus rolled and scrabbled away, fingers and toes biting against the stone without any concern for pain of cold. A huge metal hand gently waved through the spot were she had just been lying and the shards of shattering stone exploded out to cut across her legs and back. She couldn't scream if she wanted to. Samus crawled and rushed across broken ground as heavy footsteps fell behind her. But then she was pressed against a corner of heavy damp stone on each side of her. She turned back and before her stood the statue, pure black against the beautiful sunlight behind it.

Samus closed her eyes as it drew back its hand once more.

Then a rushing sound filled the cavern and a blast of wind sent Samus' blond hair flying. The world echoed with the collision of two unstoppable forces. She opened her eyes to see a new shape standing over her, both arms raised to meet the impact of the statue's falling hand. Dark brown robes whipped one last time in the speed of their arrival before they fell down to once more cover the clawed feet that had scratched the stone on each side of her. Old Bird's powerful limbs trembled with exertion as he held up the weight of an angry planet above a scared child.

A single pale yellow eye was in view to look down at two little blue ones set in red veins irritated from the hostile air. Then, as he looked down at her, Old Bird slowly opened his beak. Samus had only ever heard him say a handful of words in the months they had held her here. He had always seemed content to let Grey Voice be the one to break the silence of their dusty, lonely world. But now he turned his head back to face the terrible burning eyes of the statue and he began to speak. No, he began to sing.

Samus didn't know if it was words. She didn't think it was. But it was a note that spilled out through metal and stone, flesh and bone. In it there was sorrow, and regret, and endless endless years, but under it all there was strength and righteous fury. It was the fire that burned within and knew that even against the vast uncaring universe and impossible odds there was no choice but to stand up against all creation. To throw everything one tiny life had against the might of infinity. With this song it might be an even match.

The statue stood still. Then it drew back its hand and turned to slowly walk back to its plinth, sitting down once more to clutch that glowing orb. It fell silent and the fire departed from its eyes. Then the only sound in the cavern was Old Bird taking a heavy, shaking breath. For a long moment he stood there, back heaving as his hands trembled with the echo of more exertion than he had made in centuries. Then he felt a small tug at his robes, down below his knee. He turned and saw the small pale human child, weak with fear and cold, exhausted beyond all measure, with blood pooling at her feet. But this child was standing on buckling legs and held his robe tight in her fist as forgotten tears made lines down her face. Her eyes met his.

Old Bird kneeled down to gather up the child in his hands. As soon as he clutched her, he felt the human go limp. Her eyes closed in sudden merciful sleep, the last tiny reserve of energy depleted. Her injured legs folded against her chest, Old Bird could cradle her in his hands like holding an egg. For a moment he looked down at this tiny creature in silence. Then he stood up and walked back towards the temple halls.

The ancient statue sat alone in the empty cavern as motes of dust danced in the sunlight.

...

The crackling electric screech of a metroid echoed through the halls of the Research Station. Samus ran, her mind leaping through the possibilities as her blood pounded with the familiar beat of fear. A metroid outbreak on the planet. Who'd brought them here; the Pirates, the Federation? The Pirates had been firing some sort of live cargo in their missiles. The Federation had a history of experiments with metroids. And Samus also remembered a series of ancient empty metal canisters in the labs behind her. The Chozo inscription had mentioned a creation, had that race released those monsters of theirs here as well as SR388? Whose sin was it this time? Whatever the case, Samus was not in any shape to fight anything on that level. She needed to contain it or escape, and right now escape was far preferable.

The glass window of an office flitted by on her right as her orange reflection flashed across it. Samus' heart rate was rising but fear was not allowed to take purchase in her mind. She'd only rebuilt three of her suit's shield emitters so far, once they failed her armor was just metal and carbon. The path through the floor plan still shone in her eyes, an illusionary line traced through walls to the rendezvous point. She needed to contact Aurora, message Nakamura. Let them know that every living being on this planet was in mortal danger. And if those in command already knew, then...

The next office wall she passed lay on the floor as scattered glass shards. It was broken inward, and inside she saw small piles of grey dust. Scan still said that the material was simply unorganized organic molecules, simply another form of normal dirt, but now it sickened her. One part of the dust pile still retained its shape as a human forearm, fingers outstretched and grasping. Samus kneeled down beside it, boots crunching on the broken glass. She reached out with her gauntleted hand and brushed the grey arm. At the slightest contact the ashy shape lost cohesion and dissolved into the same fine grey dust which covered the rest of the office. A feeding metroid consumed everything. They left only a shadow.

Samus glanced up at the computer terminal still projected up over bashed and gouged desk. There was an alert flashing there. " _Emergency procedure A1_ " Whatever that plan was it hadn't been enough for this victim. Also, this plan of security through obscurity didn't help Samus right now. Aurora would know but that upcoming meeting had just plummeted in priority. Samus' map had redirected to show her a path straight outside. Right now, she'd prefer to fight the entire Pirate landing force than what was lurking in this laboratory. She started running, following the glowing line that only existed before her eyes.

Around the corner the hallway opened up into some large central room, a kind of hub for the researchers combing through the loot of the Chozo ruins. Samus' eyes were locked on the next exit, only dimly taking in an expanse of clean tiles and circular administrative desks from the periphery of her vision. Then her suit radar blinked in the corner of her mask and she dropped into cover before she had time to process the thought.

She was down on the floor, her armored back against a kiosk desk, when a shadow washed across the far wall. Other than the sound of her breathing echoing through her skull, the only disturbance to the silence was a faint crackle. Samus could feel her ears straining as she focused on that sound, like tiny sparks and ozone. A metroid barely had anything that resembled biology; their locomotion was an independently generated antigrav field. They didn't walk, or breath, or copulate. But they ate. And they grew.

The numbers flashed on Samus' visor as the suit calculated the size of the creature that cast that brief shadow. It was still on the small side, not yet near the next metamorphosis. That was good news. However, though the metroid hadn't spotted her suit-shielded biological signatures from anything short of line of sight, the creature had drifted over to the path Samus had planned to take out of this building. Well, that plan wasn't happening any more.

She didn't move, having no choice but to trust a the thin barrier of metal and concrete or whatever the architect had decided to use for this desk feature. She was just lucky that the suit helmet meant nothing could hear her loud breathing. All she had to do was watch the wavering orange dot move along the floor plan map that floated before her eyes. There, it was leaving. It would just take a second to...

The dot stopped. The faint crackling, popping sound got louder. Samus' hand clenched inside her weapon. It was still fine, that pattern had other explanations. Metroids at this growth stage moved in strange, random ways. It hadn't detected her, it was just...

A hungry electric chirp echoed out across the flat white walls of the lab. The dot raced towards her. Well, so much for hiding. Samus sprang up and vaulted over the desk bank with one hand easily lifting her body. Behind her the curious chirping instantly transformed into a furious screech like lightning and tearing metal. However, even as Samus' feet hit the ground in a full sprint a wash of angry light grew in the barrel of her weapon. She reached the far exit in under two seconds, the toes of her boots gouging holds in the industrial strength tiles that lined the floor. The she was at an intersection where she spun around to meet the coming charge.

The metroid flew towards her, its bulbous transparent dome half hidden behind the grasping talons and fangs that sparked with arcing energy as it screamed. The creatures always looked incomplete, an organ that had broken free of some grotesque host to float along propelled by its own malevolence and hunger. But it was fast. Samus narrowed her eyes and let fire the fully charged blast from her power beam.

In the tight confines of the funneling hallway the metroid had no chance of dodging. Of course, in Samus' damaged state that meager beam also had no chance of actually harming the creature but the sudden burst of light, heat, and force was certainly surprising. Before the metroid recovered its shaken equilibrium, bobbing and twitching in the air amid the dust raining down from the blast-cracked ceiling, Samus was gone.

Her boots made a good deal of sound impacting the floor at this pace but right now Samus was more concerned with speed than secrecy. The metroid would be back on her in seconds. She needed a way to fight. Her darting path took her past labs full of disassembled Chozo machines or slabs of carved inscriptions. The her visor flashed as the suit scan offered up a new destination; a little rectangle in the floor plan map labeled _Security_. That would have to do.

Samus smashed around the corner already firing at where the Security office should be. A charge beam blast hit the armored security glass, followed by a volley of smaller shots that propagated the dissentingly thin web of cracks as she ran forward. Really, she had to complement whoever had sprung for the quality of materials in this seemingly low security wing. However, even the resolute glass couldn't stand up to an armor enhanced punch at her full running speed. The gun crunched through the shattering window first. Her suit's main armament was a hyper advance beam weapon of unparalleled adaptability, but it was also thirty pounds of ultra dense alloys strapped the the end of her arm. So sometimes she hit things with it.

Samus rolled up to her feet amid the expanding rain of flying glass. The far walls of the Security station held weapon racks, and Samus was already firing her weapon to reduce them to base components even as the suit returned its disappointing scan results. She supposed that hoping for a full belt of cryomissiles was a little too much, but still she'd been hoping for more than ten low voltage stun guns when a Metoid was hunting her. As she blasted apart the few more promising looking supplies one of the guns escaped destruction by slipping off the rack. It hit the ground and fired off two little needles with a soft chunk, trailing thin wires. They bounced off Samus' thigh.

Amid the smoke and dust, she swept her gun across the room, the barrel now sucking in the newly aerosolized rubble. Plasma coil components and heavy element shards; better than nothing. Still not really useful against a metroid. Particularly one that was currently hurtling towards her with the intent to devour. Time to move.

" _Basic Missiles Restored_ "

However, that did open up new possibilities when it came to this floor plan she was navigating from. Scan opened and closed the far security door, letting Samus out just in time for the metroid to smash into the metal as it slammed shut behind her. That should hold it for two and a half second. Then she heard a shattering sound behind her and had to commend the little guy on being stronger than he looked. It was a pity it still wanted to rip her molecules apart.

She took the next corner at a speed that would be illegal in a school zone, her toes briefly denting footholds into the paneling. By this point in her life she was quite experienced at running for her life but unfortunately metroids were fast and didn't have to worry about things like traction. Her only chance was to keep it uncertain and confused. Her still healing chest strained as she sprinted, the crackling ionization closing behind her. Then she stuck out her hand into a passing doorway and abruptly pulled herself back in a bone jarringly swift change of direction. The suit and her innate enhancements meant she didn't quite dislocate her shoulder as her fingers dug into the metal frame. The metroid missed that turn, but it was still not quite enough. In that same instant an ionizing scream behind her and its lunge scratched against her right shoulder.

Pain shot through Samus' every cell as she screamed, even as she launched back to her feet and kept running. A single point of the metroid's fangs had scraped across her suit's shoulder plate as it hurtled by in its missed strike, but that was enough. The life energy absorption attack didn't care about armor and was barely dampened by shields. No, that crackling spark jolted straight to the core of that mystical essence that defined all life. Identifying that fundamental force had been called the Chozo's greatest discovery. So of course they had made a monster that consumed it.

Samus' lungs spasmed in protest as she still ran through the darkened facility, hearing the telltale sounds of the metroid swooping back around and launching after her trail. It was faster than her and Samus was uncertain if she could withstand even another glancing blow. However, up ahead a very interesting part of this building's floor plan matched up. Her gun shifted as the metal rearranged itself, and as she ran her right arm thudded three times. Energy shrouded projectiles launched out and downwards, all detonating against the floor up ahead. Right above where the map said a particularly high ceilinged room lay below. Samus jumped and spun in the air, turning her back to the floor as it crumbled and collapsed beneath her path. The metroid screamed as it raced through the air, but the gun thudded again as missiles shot straight up at the ceiling above. Samus fell down through the crumbling floor as the top of the room fell with her, sealing the way behind her. The metroid's thwarted shriek reverberated in fury and hunger through the shifting rubble as it collided and bounced off.

Samus smirked as she plummeted down into the dark. Then she hit the floor flat on her back and abruptly remembered that her organs weren't done healing yet.

Ouch.

...


	8. A Sacrifice

...

Dust trickled down from the rubble packed ceiling in fitful streams through the dim glow of emergency lighting. Samus raised herself off newly cracked floor tiles and onto her feet as she glanced around this tall, empty room in the lower reaches of the Research facility. There were balconies from a higher level looking out over the space she had just fallen through. The faint green lights of exit signs washed out to give a vague suggestion of walls down further hallways.

Ripping and scraping crashes up above indicated that the hunting metroid was still irritated that she had escaped. But then a second later those noises vanished and once again Samus was left in silence. It was gone, but if there was one of those creatures then there were undoubtably more. No one seeking to use those living weapons would release just one. However, Samus still needed to reach the rendezvous point with Nakamura's Aurora unit. If that computer was overseeing the protection of the remaining colonists then it had to be told about the metroid.

If it didn't already know.

Samus shifted the fingers of her left hand to navigate virtual menus and expanded the facility map to fill her vision. She'd fallen down into the sub-levels, but this was still part of the Chozo research building. A shining line appeared in the air as the suit plotted a course out to the contact node Nakamura had sent her towards. Now there was nothing left to do but hurry.

Her heavy footsteps echoed through the quiet halls as Samus jogged along through this manmade cavern. Then she approached at an intersection of passages and noticed several small items on the floor. Some scattered papers, a woman's shoe, and a data stylus, all kicked to the corners of the hall and forming the vague suggestion of trail off towards a nearby staircase. They were the kind of things that might be dropped if the staff of this facility were evacuating under an "Emergency Procedure A1".

Samus slowed to a stop as she glanced at her map again. A quick command to the suit sent it searching for a new set of parameters: a large room, or a blank space, armored and secure, somewhere deep under the facility that was left off the map. Somewhere the humans might be hiding their shelter. In a blink a flashing icon appeared as her visor displayed a message. " _A likely site for the evacuation shelter has been located._ " Samus had been right, it was deep and protected. Perhaps this was location of some of civilians Aurora had safe in its charge. Or maybe these people were lost and cut off since the chaos of the first attack. Samus changed direction, turning away from her exit route.

It wasn't more than a hundred yards of walking before she began to see the indications. A set of elevator doors were twisted open, the metal crumpled and ripped. Something had made a path through the lift shaft. Something with claws that burnt like arcing electricity. Samus' felt her heart over a precipice. She turned and started to run.

A screen on the wall was still flashing the message " _Emergency Shelter_ ". There was an arrow on it pointing down the hall. Samus' boot made a print in fine grey dust that lay next to a pair of broken glasses. There were gouge marks in the white wall panels, and scratches across the floor. Then Samus turned a final corner to see the massive armored shelter door. It was mercifully unmarked by those scratches and gouges. The slab still shone of polished metal, designed to lock out the world with heavy alloys and powerful shields.

But the door was ajar.

Samus stopped running. She slowly walked forward, the silence of these tunnels growing to a ringing in her ears. Then she crossed the vault threshold into a soft warm light.

The shelter was a very large room, now dappled with strange shadows. This uncertain illumination spread out over a statue garden of fallen corpses. Samus' footsteps faintly echoed against the floor as she walked between the pale grey bodies, frozen in the collapsed rictus of their final moments. There were over a hundred here, most in two clusters, one scattered near the vault door and another pressed back against the far corner or the chamber. They hadn't gotten the door closed by the time the first metroid made it through. Then Samus looked up and saw what was causing the strange speckled light.

Over half of the overhead lights were covered with a fibrous organic webbing, the strands stretching and twisting down to form bulbous tumors. Samus' fury began to beat faster in her chest; metroid eggs. No, something different. Metroid hives, all clinging to the light fixtures for the heat and energy they provided. The plague was already multiplying. This wasn't the natural metroid cycle, if such a thing had any meaning. Someone must have brought the survivors of one of the other metroid weapon programs here to this planet. Samus looked around the ashy charnel house, her eyes taking in the clues of this slaughter. After the feast the metroids accomplished here at least one must have gathered enough energy to trigger its metamorphosis into a higher form. There was no chance of a queen already, the usual egg layers, but Samus had seen strange twists in the species life cycle before, too many times. Those various groups seeking to use them had made many terrible things.

Fury rose in her chest as her fist clenched at her side. Those idiots! Who was it this time? The Pirates, the Humans, or even the damn Chozo themselves. They kept making the same mistakes. The same mistakes over and over and every time more people died! How many hundreds? How many thousands? And she was always there to clean up after them, to bring down the necessary justice that the universe refused to supply. So much of her life had been spent dispensing justice she'd not had the chance to enjoy vengeance.

The suit noticed her base biology racing. " _Alert: Agitated mental state detected. Your higher thought processes will be compromised if you continue._ "

She took a breath to calm herself. If the suit was unveiling new types of warnings like that then it must still be on medical watch from her injuries. As if in response, a dull ache in her abdomen reminded her of how good painkillers would feel right about now. Meditative ice chilled back around her mind, allowing the fury to drift away. She could tend this anger for later. Her glare darted around the woven husks of the hives and saw that most of the eggs had already burst, the broken shreds hanging down as evidence of the violent hatching. What remained was too small for a traditional egg, and it looked like the inside had been chambered, further subdividing the space. Whatever hatched from that would have been underdeveloped, lacking even the normal metroid ability for limited thought until it had time to grow and harden.

Not that she would give it the chance to hatch. A charged power beam blast tore through the first hive egg, followed by a missile whose detonation ripped apart the writhing half-formed thing that fell out. The wrecked shelter flashed again and again as Samus let out more shots, shredding everything that was left down to cells and fluid. Hot wind whipped around the pillars, allowing the ash shadows of the fallen to drift away into the air and oblivion. But still she knew some of the metroids had already hatched. They would be spreading out, seeking any higher organization life to drain to dust. In her current state Samus couldn't fight them. She needed to repair her suit and Aurora-929 was her best chance for that. She just needed to get to the rendezvous past a minimum of one hunting metroid she already knew was patrolling thus building.

Well, it had been over twelve hours since she'd decided to do something nearly suicidal. She was due.

Samus silently raced through the faculty. Her suit might sometimes look like a parade ground mascot, but Samus could be surprisingly stealthy in it when she wanted. Precise physical control and subtle manipulations of the surface shields meant that as she swiftly moved through the stairways and laboratory halls she made almost no noise at all. Unless she directly stumbled into that metroid again, there was no way it would find her.

That thought was still forming in her head when the crackling screech rang out with a familiarity that made her stomach drop. Samus couldn't stop the impulse to hang her head in exasperation. She'd encountered S-rank bounty hunters who were worse at tracking her down than this lone half-grown floating aberration. Seriously, had she stepped in something it could smell? The exit was still two hundred yards away, up a staircase and through a web of corridors that made Samus want to strangle some architects. She was already running at her current top speed but the little blinking dot had just appeared on her radar and it was moving still faster.

" _Upgrade materials detected"_

She could have kissed someone at that moment but instead Samus settled for taking a sharp right and smashing through a door not rated to withstand her current level of desperation. Inside was another lab, with the same computers and piping across the ceiling, more Chozo artifacts for federation study. Samus glanced around and recognized the delicate device of bronze colored metal in the middle of the room as some sort of Chozo observation device or a sensor. But the virtual icon was floating over it so she was already smashing her fist through the weakest looking lens before she could appreciate any more of its elegant design. The inner workings crunched under her gauntlet as dematerialization energy swirled around her arm.

" _Thermal Detection equipment restored_ "

That was not exactly what she'd been hoping for. She'd just wasted valuable time, but her hunger for any chance of rebuilding her ice beam had been too much. Then the hunting metroid's shriek blasted from right outside and Samus' internal monologue dissolved from musings on the threat of greed into a stream of pure repeated profanity. A second later a wall exploded inwards and even profanity blinked out of her mind.

Samus dropped to the floor amid falling shattered fragments and her first charged blast struck from below to deflect the charging metroid up and over her. Samus flipped up from the ground and sprang off the back wall as the creature swerved in the air and darted back, slamming into the floor where she'd been half a second earlier. This thing was too fast, too maneuverable. And Samus had no way to really hurt it.

Then her world suddenly blinked dark. In the half second it took her to process what had happened she was blind and then glowing red orbs over sparking electric prongs flew down towards her. Samus just barely dodged that, the metroid's attack, even as another glancing strike against her armor sent pain stabbing through her core. Samus rolled to her feet as she tapped her helmet at the temple to restoring her normal vision. The thermal visor had just randomly turned on at a moment that could well have killed her. But now her sight had returned and she could see the metroid circling around through the air up near the pipe covered ceiling, preparing for another dive from among the vents and conduits. It was taking its time now. It had learned from her dodging tactics and was now limiting her options. They were always so uncomfortably quick to adapt.

Then, even as Samus was charging up another high energy blast from her power beam, the world blinked into blue and red again. Whatever was wrong with the suit, Samus was now ready for this glitch and she kept track of the creature above her even as most of it faded from view leaving only the metroid's central nuclei and hungering fangs glowed an angry red against a backdrop of bright yellow electric cables and dark purple cooling vents. And then there was that one stripe across the ceiling that was pure dripping black. Samus managed to switch her vision back again but as she did so she still saw condensation fog boiling off the surface of the liquid nitrogen pipe like clouds from a peak. It looked like hope.

Then the metroid struck from above. This time Samus couldn't dodge quickly enough but she managed to thrust out her power beam, meeting it's thunderous descent barrel to mouth. Claws locked down around her upper arm with terrible strength even as she unloaded a full power charge beam attack at point blank to the metroid's central maw. The thunderclap blast managed to stun the creature for almost half a second even as claws pierced through armor into Samus' bicep as though the Chozo metal was scrap tin. Then came the pain, all encompassing and blinding as the metroid began attempting to disintegrate her suit's shields and her own cellular makeup at the same time. Colors flashed as the nerves in her eyes spasmed in random activation while her half-consumed right hand kept firing an endless stream of energy blasts into the metroid's underbelly. She might have been screaming. She couldn't tell.

But even as half seen warnings flashed in her visor, Samus gathered herself and crouched down beneath the metroid's thrashing, crushing force. Necrotic electricity sparked across her body, racing down from the fangs. She had enough strength for just one more move before bone and metal both gave way to the universe-destroying pain.

She roared in fury and jumped straight up into the ceiling.

The metroid completely ignored the smashing impact against a heavy metal pipe and continued eating her. However, it could not ignore the frothing torrent of liquid nitrogen that splashed across its transparent shell when that pipe burst. A scream more terrible than any before shook the room as Samus fell down to the floor, her armored back thudding off the hard corner of a workstation.

The metroid flung back and slammed against the far wall, a thin ice shell growing on suddenly discolored, warped flesh. Samus rose to her knees as her gun thudded out a single missile shot, wreathed in shimmering energy. The creature was blinded, and as the explosion went off against its terrible wound it spun off through the air. The metroid staggered across the lab, smashing through machinery and desks in its maddened state. Samus raised her scarred and pitted gun for another shot and clicked down on the trigger. Nothing happened. It seemed all those flashing damage alerts in her visor had finally caught up with the action. A few yards away the metroid roared in now indescribable hunger, ready to exact vengeance on the entire world for its pain. Glass trembled and shattered, then an orange metal hand gripped down onto its largest dangling fang. Samus threw with all her strength, not letting go for a second as she smashed the creature back through the roiling waterfall of freezing nitrogen. The cold touched her hand too and Samus joined in the metroid's screaming but she slammed the creature down into the floor at the frothing terminus as the pain in her hand drove out even her instinct to breath. Spasmed tendons couldn't let go and the only thought remaining to her was her weapon-covered right arm punching down unto the metroid's ice wounded shell, over and over with all her strength.

Blood flecks covered her visor as the vessels in her eyes burst from the metroid's sparking retribution, but still her arm came down, again and again like a massive hammer. Then, finally, Samus' shattered mind reformed enough to notice that her world of pain was no longer expanding. Her impacts slowed and she saw that the gun now slid through a shattered hole in the metroid's carapace, down into the destroyed slush of its former core. The creature was dead.

The suit took the energy of its passing and even as Samus staggered to her feet it began to execute some crucial repairs. The armor around her arms glowed faintly as some of the most crippling damage began to shift and rearrange. Painkillers flooded her system and this time Samus didn't even try to argue. In that final struggle, half her body had been in that stream of liquid nitrogen and inside the armor her flesh dealt with that kind of cold no better than the metroid's. She was so tired. Her arms hung limply at her sides, completely out of her conscious control in her current state. Her feet moved and Samus wasn't sure if that was her doing or an automatic action of the suit. But the glowing line to the rendezvous point with Aurora still traced along the map and she was following it.

A thought drifted across her chemical addled brain. That had been a juvenile metroid; not even done with its first form's growth. That was the least possible threat on this planet and she was almost dead from fighting it.

The final facility door gave way after a second impact and burst open with a snap of metal bolts. Samus staggered outside into the bright sunlight. Around her, clean white sidewalks and well tended planters of native foliage taunted her in the broad open spaces between the hulking Research buildings. Everything looked so normal, like a university campus on any number of human worlds. Shadows of the long connecting bridges between some of those buildings criss-crossed the ground as Samus saw the sun was dipping into afternoon. A breeze still blew across the dusty ground.

Her head twitched to the side as the suit detected an unexpected energy signature. Even that little motion sent a spasm down her back, but Samus didn't let that compromise her guard. The target was almost ninety yards away and Samus took an even longer path, edging around a slight hill of higher elevation to get the best firing line. Belatedly, her shock-addled brain remembered that the suit's weapons were temporarily down for repairs after the metroid fight, but it turned out that mistake didn't matter. The energy signature and faint transmission were coming from one of the Pirate's mysterious missiles turned drop pods.

The strange craft jabbed out of the ground like a knife thrust down into the earth. The middle section was open and exposed, panels flung back to expose a void in the center of the missile, space for the living cargo. It was empty. Samus moved forward cautiously, although both scan and thermal said there was no life anywhere nearby. She stopped beside the missile pod, one foot up on the rim of tiny crater its fall had left in the soft soil. There were sturdy circular rings mounted the pod's frame and on the open doors. They looked like restraints.

What had been chained inside here? This had clearly landed hours ago, the wind had swept free all the light dust the impact would have kicked up, and left a faintly spreading trail of grit reaching from the crater edges. So this wasn't one of the those she'd seen fly overhead a little while ago. Was this how the Pirates had initiated the metroid attack? Suit scan gave back nothing. Some carbon-based traces but nothing that could leave a genetic signature. There was also some faint damage to the metal, scratches and dents that might match a thrashing metroid's pattern as well as a bit of corrosive pitting.

The wind kicked up again as Samus stepped back from the strange landing site. In the distance she heard the strange whistling moan of the upper canyons again. It sounded like music, lost and sad. A dirge for a world twice dead. Her fist clenched even as that motion sent pain though her badly injured nerves and tendons. No, this world had not fallen yet. She would not let that happen. Samus turned and made her way across the campus towards the blinking icon on her visor map.

It turned out Aurora's chosen rendezvous point was a small administrative building separate from the looming Research towers that dotted the rest of the facility campus. Apparently Nakamura had forwarded her clearance since these doors slid open with a cheerful chime even as Samus raised her wobbling arm to smash them. So she contented herself with just staggering in, past furniture made in imitation of dark wood and numerous posters celebrating different departments. One of featured a cartoonish figure of a smiling Chozo with huge eyes that thanked people for " _chozoing_ " to follow proper salvage log procedures. It was actually too absurd to be offensive.

Then a final armored door, a thick affair disguised as aged mahogany, graciously swung open and Samus plodded into a large office. A little brass plaque said this room belonged to some type of president. But the only thing Samus focused on was the large computer screen that unfolded along the least cluttered wall.

A blue circle icon appeared on the screen. "Hello, Samus. I am Aurora Unit 926."

Samus slowly fell back into the president's chair. The poor piece of furniture dropped a little bit as some mechanism snapped under her weight but thankfully the rest managed to hold. However, no matter how bad she felt, she could still talk.

"Metroids on-world. Killed the Chozo laboratory shelter. Reproducing."

The little blue circle managed to look shocked and dismayed. "Oh no. How did that happen? I severed all communication between the shelters so that the discovery of one could not lead the Pirate forces to all the others, but I had hoped they had all managed to escape detection. Something must have gone wrong, no metroid should have been able to get inside those protections. It seems our tragedy continues. Thank you for telling me, Samus, I shall update the casualty report accordingly."

Apparently the suit repairs had carried on far enough to restore partial functionality to her power beam because a single shot smashed into the bookshelf on the far wall. Aurora's little circle seemed to flinch. Samus growled from within her helmet. "The metroids. Was it you? Was it the Federation? Get me Nakamura on coms right now."

The blue dot tried to put on a reassuring yet firm tone. "Unfortunately, Commander Nakamura has severed all further communications pending full repairs to the Diomedes. We have reason to believe that the Pirates managed to break our encryption shortly after his last communication with you. But I can assure you, the Galactic Federation is not responsible for these metroids. They emerged shortly after the Pirate Commander Ridly's personal transport landed on the planet. It has taken all my resources to fend them off from my primary location."

Samus remained silent. Her eyes focused on the little dot that suit scan was the room's primary camera. An any sufficiently complex life could feel the press of properly trained mind. A traditional computer wouldn't care about being stared at, but all the strengths of a bio-mind came with their own attendant weaknesses. And Samus was not yet satisfied.

After a moment Aurora spoke again, more intensely and with the slightest hint of desperation. "I am not lying to you. I could not if I wanted to, as that would be in direct defiance of my last orders from Commander Nakamura. Right now you are my only hope for my own survival and the preservation of my five thousand remaining charges. I will help you in any way I can and I will start with giving you all the resources I can spare."

Samus flinched slightly at a sudden noise as another previously hidden panel slid open in the wall beside her. That flinch was a bad sign. Her nerves were shot. Her instincts and training misfiring; this kind of twitching without any clear purpose was never useful. Then the newly exposed wall alcove cycled closed and when it opened there was a glowing power core sitting in it. Samus could have sworn that the suit scan sounded hungry as it analyzed the energy signature it gave off.

Aurora chimed. "I have seven of these lined up for transport to your current location, as well as components my records indicate could be of use to your suit in the event of various scenarios of catastrophic damage. It is in our best interest to return you to operational effectiveness as soon as possible." Aurora spoke and Samus felt some of her distrust begin to flow out of her. Of course she recognized that could also just be the increased painkillers in her blood, but if Aurora was in favor of protecting the remaining colonists then Samus was on her side at least for that. All the other answers could come second. They would still be answered. In due time the truth was always revealed. Truth lay at the end of all roads.

Samus stood up and reached out with her left hand to let the suit start dematerializing the power core while Aurora moved onto tactical matters. A map of floating blue lines suddenly flashed into existence around her, the hologram filling most of the room with a miniature version of the colony's valley. The master-computer's story of the distressingly short defense of the planet came out through hidden speakers, mixing in Samus' ears with the chimes of the suit absorbing power and components.

In the middle of Aurora's speech, a welcome message blinked in Samus' eyes as her maximum shield load continued to tick upwards. " _Super Missile capability and Maneuvering Thrusters have been restored_ "

Samus stared past those words to look at the hologram map of the colony, tracing the web of buildings between ghostlike outlines of the canyon walls. It was like a maze, trapped within steep boundaries even before the valley split into the branching labyrinth of the lava tubes uphill. Still, as battlefields went she had seen worse. And it was not like she could run from this fight no matter what the ground looked like. Then an odd little red icon flashed into existence on the map, just within the marked bounds of the Pirate beachhead area.

She pointed. "What is-"

"Transmission from one of the emergency shelters." All the inflection dropped out of Aurora's synthesized voice. Something else was now occupying a lion's share of the bio-computer's considerable attention. Samus' heart began to beat faster. Aurora said it had cut the hardwired communications so if they could hear this transmission than the Pirates could too. This splinter fleet had shown absurdly competent computing prowess, it would crack the colonial security nearly instantly, which meant the enemy was now looking at this exact same map.

A new voice filled the office, a male human's. "Aurora, this is Shelter 9! We need help!"

Samus' internal monologue cursed at this person to shut up, remain quiet and hidden but of course that chance had already been lost. The man's transmission continued.

"The shelter's air filters stopped working several hours ago. We tried to hold on for as long as we could but as soon as we broke the shielding seal Space Pirates started moving towards our location. Aurora, Federation soldiers, anyone out there! We need you!" Some indistinct noise happened outside the programed pick-up range of the transmitting microphone. Then the man began to speak again, the sick tones of doom sinking into his voice. "I have to go, they're coming. There are a hundred and fifty three of us here. Children too. Someone help us or...They're coming."

The transmission ended.

Samus was already moving towards the door, suit plotting a route through the upper reaches of the city and determining likely sites that the colonists might hold up. She pushed the pain from her weary limbs out of her mind however the math that remained was unescapable. No matter how fast she ran the Pirates would get to Shelter 9 first. She could only hope that the civilians had enough weapons to stall for even a little bit. Once Samus arrived she should be able to provide quite a significant distraction.

She spat out orders as she punched open the office's false wood doors. "Aurora, reroute the colony distribution network to make overload power surges in that area." Anything to throw even a bit of interference in Pirate sensors, a kink in their plans. "And I demand that you-"

The bio-computer abruptly interrupted, "I am picking up a high strength Space Pirate broadcast. Unencrypted, planetary origin, human standard language."

Samus stopped and closed her mouth, cutting off her former argument. That could wait. The Pirates were not usually a lot for conversation. But this time it didn't look like Aurora was volunteering the audio without prompting. Samus turned to glare at that blue circle on the screen.

"Play it."

The sound was a cacophony of overlaid vocal tracks. The core Pirate species was innately skilled at deciphering simultaneous noise sources so they had an annoying tendency to simply play their translations on the same waveform as the original. However, by now deciphering this mess was second nature to Samus so she didn't bother looking at the transcription Aurora added at the bottom of the screen. She was too focused because this particular auditory chaos was familiar. She recognized that voice growling behind the monotone human standard translation.

"Samus Aran."

Ridley's long reptilian mouth couldn't contort in the required ways to pronounce that name but all the same through spite and fury this one almost managed it. Samus could barely hear the automatic translator program over his gnashing. Her heartbeat seemed to slow. So much for a surprise attack. The Pirates knew she was here on the planet's surface.

A deep rumble of breath vibrated the speakers and then the oddly breathy voice continued, contaminated with wet noises as a long tongue snaked around rows of dagger-like teeth. "Samus Aran. I saw you. I saw you inspecting that launch pod. Have you seen my strategy? Did it give you pleasure? Did it give you fear? You are a killer. You have killed so many of my kind. You kill those who seek the creations of the Chozo, so you destroy them all. But I am a killer too. And your blood-kind is now within my reach. I will kill them. Come, stop me. Come, fight me. I have a secret that you will want to kill me for. Now I will have your power too. Come, and we will each kill what we can kill."

In the silence that followed Samus noticed her left hand was clenched into a fist. At least that motion didn't hurt anymore. Her cellular makeup seemed to be recovering from that metroid attack incredibly quickly compared to previous injuries. That was good news. She couldn't afford any more weaknesses. In hindsight her mistake was obvious. There was a camera in the drop-pod missile; Pirate command taking track of what they'd deployed there. She'd let her pain-addled self stumble into it and thus gave away a crucial tactical advantage. It was an unforgivable mistake and one that those colonists in Shelter 9 might pay for. Ridley was ready for her now.

Her suit volunteered a message across the visor. "The fastest route is laid before you"

So she ran, out of the office and through the empty carpeted halls. Aurora wasn't sounding so chatty anymore so Samus dashed out of the administrative building amid silence and out across the open grounds of the massive Research Center campus. The shielded mass of the enormous central building loomed in the distance, hiding away Aurora and the humans she had managed to save.

Samus ran under clear blue sky. There wasn't any time to be sneaky now, if any airborne hostiles, Pirate or metroid, saw her now she would just have to deal with that. Maybe she could even lead a metroid into the pirate attack squad; cause a little more chaos in their lines. Even if Ridely had deployed the metroids, there was a decidedly poor record for that kind of people actually managing to control what those creatures did once let loose.

Then, just outside the broken and blaster p-scarred gates of the campus front entrance, Samus figured out how Ridely planned on controlling the metroids. Up ahead was another one of the missile pods, but this one had fallen rather recently. Samus stepped over the broken wreckage of defeated colonial security bots, destroyed in whatever first wave of the pirate attack had taken place here, as she moved towards the vertical missile craft that had punched through the pavement to anchor itself like a grotesque statue. This one still had its cargo, and it was still alive.

The low-caste Space Pirate writhed and struggled against the bonds that held it imprisoned in the open hull of the drop pod. Its feet were clamped together below but its wrists were fastened to the open doors, spreading the upper limbs out to the sides until they were nearly wrenched off. But more than the pain, it was fear that sent this unfortunate creature frothing and twisting in the cold breeze. Someone had told it that it was being used as live bait and this Pirate knew full well the horror that entailed.

Samus narrowed her eyes at this tactic with uncomfortably familiar respect, even as she scanned the surrounding area for sign of a potential ambush. Ridley was rarely an idiot and even his cruelty had a sick purpose. Metroids were nearly impossible to control, true, but they were easy to predict. They were motivated by hunger, so a carefully arranged pattern of live sacrifices could easily shepherd them into the desired areas and keep them there until the mission was over. After all, Pirates rarely cared about keeping planets, just staying long enough to loot them thoroughly. After that the metroids could have this world.

Then Samus took one more step forward and the Pirate's head whipped around to spot her. Excretions trailed down from its four eyes and the corners of its mouth but this individual was beyond caring about that. Samus watched its abdominal plates heave as the various lungs panted silently. It wasn't struggling against its bonds anymore, and instead just silently watched the armored warrior that had appeared before it. Samus raised her power beam and the Pirate didn't even blink as she fired. The low power blast landed beside the Pirate's head, smashing the small video sensor hidden there and cutting off Ridely's sight.

The bound Pirate let out a rattling exhalation.

Its fangs and mandibles clicked together as it spoke in its native language. "Death." It sounded almost rapturous. "It has come. It stands before me. I doubted, but they were right. We were right. And so we will be victorious. Glory is ours!" Its eyes closed. "Now I die the most perfect death, and complete the union."

For a brief second Samus just watched the Pirate as it breathed, hanging from its bonds in paradoxical comfort. Then her charged beam attack blasted its head into an organic smear. If Ridely wanted this one to be killed by metroids then Samus would not let that happen. She continued her run across the colony city. After all, her suit could consume life energy almost as well as the metroids and every little bit was needed right now to even the balance. Those colonists were being hunted.

Thoughts and mysteries swirled in her head, even as she tried to banish them. That Pirate in the sacrifice pod had only began to speak after it knew it was cut off from Command. Perhaps there was a reason why that individual had been chosen beyond expendability. An internal conflict or some defect within the Pirate forces could be very valuable. As for what that individual had been saying, well getting access to some Pirate computers might clear some of it up. Samus hoped it would. If now even the Pirates were talking in vaguely ominous mystical riddles she would just about have to scream. She'd thought they were pretty much the only creatures in her life who didn't insist on making speeches to her that way.

The suit displayed a message in her visor. " _Your decision to kill was logical_ "

Samus didn't stop running, but she almost did. The sickening sense of suspicion surged up through her core with the familiar white cold touch of fear. The suit wasn't supposed to offer judgments of her actions. It never had before in all her decades. But ever since she arrived at this planet things had changed. These strange messages had been growing in frequency, and even the standard alerts were now tinged with unusually conversational language. Something had infected the software; some defect had emerged. Her feat pounded down on the pavement as she continued her urgent dash.

She passed through a shadow that stretched across the road. This sun dipped slowly as evening was approaching. Something had welcomed her to this planet; a triggered message. Things had only gotten worse since she woke from the crash. The odd interactions with certain Chozo artifacts; none of it made sense, and none it was reassuring. Her greatest tool, a part of her very identity for most of her life was beginning to rebel against her and all but one possible explanation were very bad. All the alerts were in Chozo language but still she could hope for that faint glimmer. She had ordered the suit to reconstruct a program.

In between breaths, Samus whispered into the helmet's sensors. "Adam, is that you? Are you waking up?"

There was no answer but silence and the sound of blood beating through her ears.

...


	9. New Gods

...

Kiber-2272 scratched his pincer along the seam of his shoulder shellplate. He thought he might be allergic to something on this planet; these itches had started up about an hour after they cracked hatch down here. Of course he could tell his company's genetyrant and most likely get an instant cure tossed his way, but there was also a faint possibility that he could be instantly purged for societal unfitness. 2272 decided that a little itching was probably fine.

With nothing better to do, he walked over to the other side of this building's third floor balcony to look down a different deserted street for a change. This planet's sun was beginning to sink, by now only a few degrees above the canyon wall. Guard duty was boring; he and his squad were missing the forage for those humans that had just popped up somewhere inside the security zone. 2272 puffed his chest out a few quick times, hyperventilating a bit to stave off torpor. Being stuck in one place meant there was no chance of looting anything that might earn him even a little bit of rank. Then he glanced over at Zegar-1161 who was squatted down beside their post's little energy barrier projector, looking out the hole they'd blown in the exterior wall to get an extra firing line. 1161 had been out on a different roving team earlier in the landing. Then that team had been eaten, so 1161 got reassigned here.

Maybe guard duty wasn't so bad.

2272 paced back to his original position as he felt his metabolism kick up to combat the falling temperature. If this human building had a purpose originally, 2272 couldn't decipher it. There were just a lot of little rooms of various sizes, all filled with soft rectangles of different sizes and configurations. Out on the balcony with 2272 there was a little table with a little green plant in a glass dome. He leaned close and tapped the glass as he looked at the feathery little leaves.

"Hey, 1161, why do you think the humans put a plant in a cage? What, did they think it might escape?"

"I think that dome's full of atmosphere that's more healthy for the plant."

"What? Why wouldn't they just re-gene it until it can survive here? They were on this planet for years. I know the humans are advanced enough to manage a little genetic redesign."

1161 made a shrugging gesture with his head. "Don't ask me. I heard other species sometimes have a weird preference for unmodified organisms."

2272 tapped the glass dome again. "Huh. Crazy."

Suddenly coms lit up and a nearby transmission sounded through both their skull implants. "Watch-post seven-alpha to seven-beta, glass tapping noise detected near your location. Report now to cancel incoming mortar strike!"

"No, no!" 2272 frantically clawed at his arm panel. "That was me! No mortar strike! No mortar!"

"Report acknowledged, strike canceled" A moment of silence followed where 2272 tried to stop vibrating with tension and relief. Then the voice in his head came back, with a bit of disappointment about missing the chance to shell his squad mates. "Tapping on glass is not one of your designated duties. This deviance will be logged on your gene line."

2272's head was now resting on his pincers. "Yes. Thank you for your societal vigilance. Post seven-beta out."

Across the room, 1161 was still watching him from the same crouched position by the shield generator. 2272 now noticed that the generator's default projection trajectory had been re-aimed down through the wall at their own forces instead of out at the enemy territory. That was probably for the best. 1161 clicked his mandibles and muttered:

"That guy's a jerk."

2272 clacked his own pincers together in a vague message of agreement that didn't actually go far enough to meet the definitions of societal treason like 1161's comment did. 1161 might still be within the seventeen hour mental grace period for survivors of squad slaughter, but that didn't mean everyone could join in on that kind of dangerous talk. After all, old Kiber-2333 was still strung up to the ceiling above their alpha post just for nodding to the last grumble within squad leader's hearing. If 2272 leaned out far enough on this balcony he could see a few of 2333's limbs tied to a few of those pillars. 2272 also hoped that the dripping he could just barely make out on those stretched joints was bio-coolant and not blood. That guy had been fun to talk with when they pulled duties together. At least he didn't whisper about the two gods all the time like a lot of the old timer Kiber clan folks did.

The sun was almost set now, down over the east cliffs, and 2272's post was looking right into it. However, this was still that awkward time of day where he couldn't quite switch over to augmented vision modes without ending up even more blind than he currently was. So he just flexed his exoskeleton again and continued trying to pick out the difference between dead black building shadows and open streets lit with burning red shafts of light.

After a few more chilly minutes, 1161 spoke up again. "Those god-painters made another picture back behind our lines."

Despite himself, 2272 flinched at that conversational voice, still on edge from the mortar threat. He said, "Yeah, I saw it during the last squad cycle." A simple report of personal experience, a completely valid and unthreatening utterance. He glanced down at his arm panel and wondered if there was a way to quietly see if it was transmitting any sort of monitoring data to the genetyrants.

1161 continued to talk in his same slow way, somehow managing to hunch down on his heels even further. "There are more of the painters in recent months." Also true and therefore safe, though the statistics here were getting dangerously hard to prove with scientific accuracy. Conversational audits were a dangerous headache. However, apparently 1161 didn't care about that. "They've taken what we found out in space as a sign that the fleet's on a deterministic mission. That the cube, and the thing was in it were the start." He paused and looked over. "Do you think they could be right about it?"

That was a question: danger, danger! Unscientific superstitious consideration! Even a mental grace period couldn't excuse that kind of talk if it got logged. 2272 started to hyperventilate, his thorax shifting in and out as all his air intakes gasped. But then other thoughts filtered into his head. He'd heard this kind of talk before around the fleet members. And the number of science-heresy punishments he'd seen meted out didn't even come close to the number of offenses in even his own personal experience. Could leadership be going light on that doctrine, letting the god-painters slide? Oh no, even that thought was hearsay! But wait, if they actually weren't enforcing the doctrine then doubting their enforcement wouldn't be hearsay, right? Or would it...

Kiber-2272 pressed his head against his pincers again. This planet was going to drive him crazy. At least up on the ship there were too many of his clan for the small number of tasks so most of the time he could just find a nice bit of wall to crawl up and hang on to sleep for a few days. Now he had to sit here looking out at this empty city and listen to this Zegar clan reject try to get him purged. All the humans were dead or hiding, so it was just hours of watching wind and dust and that rocking streak of burning light that was racing towards the alpha post.

Wait, come again?

The violent explosion rocked the entire building. Shards of cement and metal blasted across the balcony, pinging off 2272's plates even as a few slivers found joints to bite into. Too late his instincts kicked in and 2272 ducked down behind the railing, just in time to limit his view of the walls around alpha post slowly crashing down.

1161's shield generator was now humming, the glowing purple barrier facing the completely wrong direction towards their back lines. "I knew it!" he yelled with inappropriate triumph. "They're shelling us! That mismatched mutant's had it out for all of us and now he's had a complete programing breakdown!"

2272's vision was slowly refocusing after the blast's pressure wave. Shock was also begining to wear off and let the pain signals through. Ow. He grunted, "No, it wasn't a mortar-"

"They said I was showing behavior fault with illogical distrust of authority! But I knew! I was-"

"No! That wasn't us! It was..." 1161's memories of a second ago swirled, a distant figure briefly glimpsed. Something running towards them. "Orange!"

1161 slowly swiveled on his crouched heels to look over. "Orange," he slowly repeated. Then another huge missile explosion rocked their building, sprouting cracks through the exterior walls. People were now firing blaster shots over in alpha post. There was a lot of yelling. "Um, what...?"

A string of smaller explosions went off like a staccato drumbeat. One of them knocked a hole in the far wall, carrying a bit of floor down with it and giving both guards a clear view down into alpha post. The whole place was blown up or on fire, but now they could see why.

"Oh," 1161 said.

She was killing everyone. The six foot tall orange and red metal destroyer danced and jumped, her arm letting out a never ending stream of brilliant death. It was that Hunter, and she was here. 2272 had a thought drift past his mind that this really wasn't fair. No one had even told him she was in this star system. But combat conditioning kicked in against all conscious thought and he opened his pincers, tentacles reaching up to fire the grafted blaster guns. To his own surprise one of his shots actually almost hit her. But then that right hand of doom turned his way and a hail of response fire smashed through Beta Post.

Off to his left he saw 1161 fling backwards and flop down to the ground, limbs sprawled and twisted. 2272 huddled behind a corner of reinforced wall, still firing off wild blaster shots down towards alpha post even if two of his eyes were squeezed closed and there were a faint high-pitched shriek coming from his mouth that absolutely could not be mistaken for a battle cry. Then the explosions started again and he just leaped up onto the nearest wall and clung there shaking like a newly shed pupa above a hungry larva bed. His face was pressed flat to the off-white paint so he could only see flashes of angry light as booms and shudders sent everything trembling around him.

Then there was one last crash of breaking cement and 2272 felt his bit of wall begin to slowly tip forward as he clung to it. The wall fell and then it hit something hard, followed by a grinding bouncing slide which carried 2272 down some rough slope head-first. The jostling stopped with an abrupt thud that almost almost shook him off. However, through all this he simply refused to move, still clinging to his little patch of wall in a hunched ball. The shooting had stopped, but there was the sound of armored human boots rushing towards him. 2272 closed all his eyes, but then those boots continued running on by.

Several minutes later 2272 finally felt capable of looking up from his little bit of wall. The off-white panel was now lying at the bottom of a rubble pile that used to make up the right wall of alpha post's landing and the left half of beta post's building. 2272 was shaking and trembling but from the look of everyone else around here that was the absolute best he could have hoped for. Part of old Kiber-2333 was still hanging from the ceiling, but only part.

Then up on their old third floor post Zegar-1161's corpse flipped back up to his feet and both 2272's hearts nearly went into fibrillation.

Zegar-1161 casually called down, "Hey Kiber, is the coast clear?"

Once 2272 confirmed that he was not in fact dying of shock he yelled back up, "What...?! I thought you were dead!"

"Nope! Just flopped over so she stopped shooting at me. Seemed sensible at the time."

"But...But...That's the most flagrantly treasonous...!" 2272 stopped sputtering as he belatedly realized that his own actions weren't much better. If this went up for review the genetyrants would be purging both of them. So he just sighed. "You're not hurt?"

"Yeah, no. I considered cutting between some of my plates to let a little bleeding sell the performance since there weren't any bodies nearby to swipe some blood from, but I figured that would take too much movement."

"...How exactly did you survive your previous squad wipe?""

1181 shrugged as he scrambled down the scree slope of partially collapsed building. "Eh, just lucky I guess."

2272 started walking off and then jerked back as he realized he was stepping in the burning remains of one if his own squadmates. That organ wasn't even supposed to be flammable. Lucky, the guy said. 2272's head hurt.

1161 moved over to stand next to him as they both looked out the open back of ruined alpha post, through the streets claimed as official staging territory. "So, should we call that in?"

A white flash and a thudding boom rang out in the distance deeper in the secure territory. 2272 glanced down at his arm panel. It was blinking furiously "I think they know already. Best to leave comm channels open. You know, for important orders and things."

1161 glanced over to his side and bent down to pick something up out of the rubble. His tentacles stuck to a little glass dome and lifted it up in his pincer. "Hey, Kiber! Your plant survived!"

That was when 2272 decided to just start walking off into the distance.

...

Samus stuck to corners and overhangs, knowing better than to trust the evening shadows to hide her from enemies who would almost certainly have thermal scans. Her attack on that guard post should send things scrambling and hopefully buy the colonists some time in the confusion. The Space Pirates loved their schemes and plans but they didn't tend to deal well with a sudden disruption thrown into the middle of it. Samus wasn't one to boast, but she was quite widely recognized as the biggest disruptor in this galactic arm and there was an extensive record, both military and legal, to prove that. If she made a big enough fuss here, caused enough damage, Ridely wouldn't be able to resist diverting all his forces to put down this threat to his authority.

She just hoped it would be enough.

This whole corner of the city showed the unmistakable signs of Pirate despoliation. Here, where the colony valley narrowed into the mouth of the lefthand volcanic canyon, every building had been scarred. The windows were smashed, doors ripped off, and piles of treasured belongings lay broken in the streets where the raiding squads had thrown them in their search for valuable equipment. At least now that she was past that first security checkpoint she was in a belt of no-man's land. The Pirates' main landing and staging point was somewhere up that canyon, in an open patch of land a safe distance away from this tangle of colony streets. The suit had briefly spotted at least two ships and some unloaded machinery during Samus' fall from orbit.

That is, if she could trust the suit's report anymore. Samus felt dread sink through her veins even as she ran. This planet was doing something; there was some power at work here and it was touching more than just her. It felt like prophecy. Three species, all now wielding Chozo technology, had come here to fight among the old masters' broken leavings. Another part of Samus' mind noted that she had just counted herself as a species separate from humanity, but there wasn't anything to do about that right now other than add that to the long list of things she should probably discuss with a professional at some point. By now it was a very long list.

Samus glared at the world as she darted across a street for more cover, avoiding a Pirate transmission signal she'd just picked up over in the other direction. She couldn't afford this lack of focus. Not now. There was a mission. She couldn't be shaken. That would mean death, for her and thousands of others. No, death was not something to fall victim to, it was hers to deal out.

Then she glanced up to see a crude skull painted on the building wall right in front of her. Her eyebrow raised. Now that was just excessively atmospheric for her inner monologue.

And it made no sense. Scan said this paint was only a few hours old, placing completion long into the Pirate occupation. The image, however rough, was clearly a human skull but there was no way any colonist was running around the streets to do some graffiti. An average GF trooper probably wouldn't be surprised, putting the death-symbol down as some pirates partaking in a standard type of warrior artwork found in any occupation. Humans had been doing the same for their whole history, against whatever enemy they fought. But the Pirates weren't human. They didn't make art. That instinct was purged from their society in the interest of scientific supremacy.

No, this was something else. Samus touched the fingers of her left hand to the wall as she followed the trails of irregular black paint that led back within this block. She remembered the Command Ship up in orbit. She remembered rough bipedal figures colored onto those walls. These Pirates were different.

Very different. Samus emerged into the back alley and her breath caught as she saw a thousand paintings covering every surface. Some were abstract, some were snatches of Pirate writing, and some were clearly meant to represent some particular Pirate clan body type. Nearly everything was in simple black, however here and a while there was a small mark of blue, or a single line of red. An experiment in color? Above this all, someone had knotted endless sheets of torn cloth into crude patchwork canopies stretching across the alley in multiple layers wherever they could find a pipe, window, or ledge to attach it too. Down at ground level it was like being in a painted cave. Far above, stars began to appear as the sun set through the thin atmosphere.

Samus knew she didn't have time for this. She needed to be running now, to find those desperate colonists before the Pirate forces did. But despite the urgency this was a mystery and she could feel every instinct of her mind fighting her better reason. There was a meaning here, something screaming at her and she just couldn't see it. This was important.

The next painted figure was tall and hunched, with long delicate fingers on huge hands. Samus recognized that: Chozo. The Pirates were drawing pictures of Chozo, sanding and kneeling, alternating above the Pirates and beneath them. There was more writing here, crudely scrawled but still legible. Samus could make out the scattered words. " _Death_ ", " _Change_ ", and " _Beginning_ ". Then there was something new, a word in Pirate script that neither she nor the suit's memory banks recognized. It looked like " _death-supreme-physics-commander_ ". The only translation Samus could think of was " _god_ ". The Pirates didn't have any word for such an idea; the very concept was highest heresy. Or at least it had been.

Then the city's electric lights flicked on, bright illumination suddenly throwing striped of dense shadow as the remaining colony grids flipped into their night mode. Sickly orange light filtered down to the painted alley from higher bulbs. In this new atmosphere the paintings abruptly changed before Samus' eyes. Directly in front of her, on a solid wall at a T-intersection, a dense maze of black paint suddenly faded from focus in favor of what was not painted. The darkness highlighted the space between the lines instead of the drawings themselves. Samus stepped forward and to her horror she could read that absence of paint. Hidden within the crude abstract drawing was a white space forming single perfect Chozo word.

It said, " _Rise_ ".

Samus' proximity radar lit up. Multiple targets; movement everywhere around her. She raised her gun and spun, only to see heat signatures register in every doorway and shadow. Pirates, at least ten of them to both her left and right. Samus gritted her teeth; she'd let herself wander into a trap. A single second had elapsed and, the foremost of them had only just begun to make their first motions but a cruel radiance was already building in the barrel of Samus' weapon. In that glacial moment before combat all her doubts and recriminations cooled and crystalized into the calm and perfect clarity of battle. Samus breathed out. This she understood.

The closest Pirate raised a small glowing blade in one clawed fist. Samus raised her gun. Then the Pirate smoothly sliced off its own hand.

Despite herself, Samus froze. That was not something she'd been ready for. Within that dearly bought second the injured Pirate fell down to its knees, and behind it all the fellows toppled too in a sweeping wave. They were kneeling, exposing their necks to their most deadly enemy and behind her Samus could hear the other group following suit, falling into abject genuflection. She could feel her own heartbeat echoing in her ears. Something very wrong was happening here. A thin trickle of bloody ichor slowly made its way across the cement towards her boot.

"Hunter." The word crackled and chirped out in the Pirates' language. That was what they called her; the title their kind had awarded her many years ago. One Pirate slowly rose, head still down, and slowly pushed away its mutilated comrade. This pirate stayed half crouched, always aiming the back of its neck at Samus' weapon as it shuffled.

"It was sung you would be here. The end must always be at the beginning."

All the varied motley of Pirates slowly began to back up while still staying low, claws and exoplates scratching against the cement. Behind her, Samus could hear the other group doing the same down the other alley. She took a step forward, her weapons still ready to blow the nearest three pirates to shreds if they twitched but still she did not fire. Pirates never trusted prophecy. And they didn't sing. The entire species had been under supreme order for decades to kill the hunter Samus Aran on site and yet this particular group was bowing before her. Confusion was like a burning itch in Samus' brain. She had to understand. She had to know.

The Pirates continued, "Escape is at hand. We will follow the angels."

Samus stopped before a new set of paintings and all of a sudden many things became terribly clear. There were two humanoid figures side by side: one red and one blue. Their shoulders were oversized globes and each only had fingers on their left hand. An angular slit served them both for eyes and the right arm was a cylinder. Each stood on a throne of scrawled metroid bodies. Samus recognized these paintings; that outline. It was the suit. It was her.

The hissing and clicking grew as more joined in. "Science is dead and entropy is the killer! But we will escape!"

Beside the blue painting were rough images of Pirates, hands outstretched to grab the blue lines that came off that Samus. By the red figure were only skulls. In the alley the Pirates' cacophony grew into something like chanting. The pirate language didn't have a word for good or evil. Science was their only good, entropy the ultimate evil. But their species had been broken by Phazon, twisted by a mutagen and then abandoned to assault, defeat, and blockade. And Samus realized that only one of these two paintings was actually her. The blue copy was her dark Phazon clone, the mother of the Pirates' recent brief ascendancy. It seemed they still worshiped her, even in destruction.

Samus was their devil, and she had won. The god of Phaaze was dead and in that fall these withdrawn addicts had found some new focus, a new drug. In the absence of god they had found religion. And now they wrote a single word in Chozo script over and over between the marks of paint.

" _Rise_ " a hundred times across the walls.

Well, if she was the demon then she might as well play the part. Samus raised her weapon and it made faint humming noises as the metal and crystal structure shifted into missile mode. This strange cult was a dangerously chaotic force thrown into the middle of this crisis. It was even possible that they had been the ones who'd release the metroids, since they painted them on the walls. Were the metroids the angels the cult would follow? But even if the cult caused confusion and violence among the Pirate forces it wasn't worth it to allow them to live. A predictable enemy was more valuable. Ridley might even thank her for eliminating these wretches, underneath his overwhelming rage at another offense of course.

As if it could hear her thoughts, the nearest pirate chittered and inched forward, pressing his head nearer to Samus' right arm; nearer its oncoming destruction.

A sudden motion warning chirped on the suit's sensors: big, and high above. Samus whipped her weapon up in time to spot a tiny gap in the roofs and overhanging fabric canopies. A small patch where the stars above briefly blinked out in a rush of black wind. Her first thought was a ship, but that was wrong. It was the shadow of enormous wings. Ridely was on the move, racing past her off into the distance. He was heading towards the transmission site.

Samus slammed through the cultish pirates, shoving one aside hard enough to hear cracking exoskeleton. The others scattered as she began firing a wild stream of quick blasts, still racing out of this damn makeshift temple. Her teeth ground in her head. She was an idiot. She'd let her curiosity draw her away from the mission and she'd done so even as she knew it was happening. She'd abandoned innocent lives for some paltry mystery. Unforgivable.

She burst out onto the street and her boots scraped across the pavement as the took the ninety degree turn. Her charged blaster shot tore off a burning path into the night sky, aimed at Ridley's trajectory but in fact just a desperate attempt to grab his attention. No one fired back or acknowledged her. The distant shadow was already racing off, too fast and ever lower as it came in for a landing behind a far off building. Samus screamed as she ran down the silent street, and then cursed herself still more for wasting oxygen her muscles needed. The suit was still damaged and she was still so slow, barely passing thirty miles per hour. The little destination icon approached at a glacial creep.

Then the colonist distress broadcasts began again, leaping out on all frequencies.

"Oh god! Help up! They're-!"

Then the transmission quality dropped and all that could be heard was shouting and screams over static.

...

Samus entered the building's shattered front entrance to the music of terrible silence. Fires were still burning on furniture near the air system vents, where the interior air had enough oxygen to encourage growth. Her footsteps crunched across the trail of devastation, over shards of broken columns and past the gouges dug through the corridors. Each door was ripped off its hinges; blasted by fire, lasers, or simply incredible strength. They were the signs of a huge creature moving through a building designed for a much smaller species.

Then, on the next floor, the blood began.

Suit scan picked up defensive marks, and Samus saw the signs of intelligently placed firing positions. These colonists had fought well and bravely. The defense had lasted for sixteen seconds.

She entered a large carnage strewn room with a high round ceiling. She noted that several of the door in here had their locks shot off from this side, as if there had been multiple locked escape routes which were pursued by Pirate forces. It was still possible a few of the humans had managed to get away. It was their city after all, they knew it better than the invaders. They might be able to hide.

But Samus did not follow those trails. Instead she simply stood amid the scattered gore in this wide main room. She was staring the hole that had been torn in the building side: an exit wound where the Pirate commander had decided he wanted quick access to the sky. Beside it was a remaining intact wall, oddly pristine and undamaged save for the huge words painted there. Samus' emotions were deadened, she was no longer astonished by the Pirates' artwork. The blood had not even had time to darken yet.

The message was painted and gouged in equal measure, as if applied by massive sharp claws. It was in human standard script, a courteous gesture. It said, " _You were late._ "

...

The escape path Samus chose to follow first turned out to be an unlucky one. These humans hadn't made it farther than three hundred yards before the five of them were gunned down in a stairwell. There were two more paths back at the massacre site that she needed to check, but Samus instead found herself exiting the blackened and bloody stairs. She slowly walked out onto an undamaged balcony. Cold wind brushed the suit's metallic skin. The night was dark, though two of the planet's small moons were currently making their orbits. A few undamaged streetlights shone up from the street below.

Off in the distance at the upper edge of the colony city, between two taller buildings, Samus could just barely see an open space shining with blinding white lights. From the blackened ground there she supposed that it might have been a park originally, some green space at the mouth of this canyon's narrowing, but now it was a burned and ashy secondary Pirate staging ground. There were some forces moving supplies and machinery around out there, thought too far for scan to give many precise details. She had a firing line from here. Of course their mortars would reduce this building to rubble shortly after, but there were always choices. Where there was life there was choice.

Then a thundering sound rolled out over the valley's cliff-made horizon like the growling roar of a distant furnace. All of a sudden, the blighted city shuddered further under an earsplitting boom. Samus didn't need the suit's sensors to analyze that for her. That was the sound of a ship rapidly decelerating after a top speed drop from orbit, its speed-of-sound wavefront finally catching up to the destination. But as always, sound was too slow. The new shadow already hung in the air over the edge of the canyon wall, moving smoothly against the bright clear stars behind it.

Samus watched the ship uneasily as it slowly descended towards the burned park where the Pirates had cleared their secondary landing area. The air still thrummed with the sound of those distant engines. The ship was big, far bigger than Samus would have expected to land given how afraid of Diomedes the fleet seemed to be. Something important was being transported in there, something that that needed to happen now rather than later. And yet it was landing here in the city, instead of at the main staging area with Ridely's ship. Strange.

She pressed against the walls of her hiding place, knowing that if she was detected now it would be her death along with everyone on the planet who was depending on her. Her curiosity had already cost too much today, but she still needed to know what the Pirates were doing. That was the only way she could destroy them. And she would, one by one until this planet was once more purged off all who had set foot here.

Samus couldn't see the ship once it landed behind those buildings, but the commotion she could see moving around down there in the burned park suggested that the main exit hatch was somewhere just out of view. She should be able to see what they offloaded. Sure enough a small platoon of guards formed up and a moment later clouds of ash and dust billowed up in the spotlights as pressurized air blasted from of the out of view ship. First into view was a stomping squad of armored Elites. Samus had been right, this was something important.

Then her heart stopped beating. The next far off figure walked into view alone, made tiny by the distance. All the same Samus recognized the shape instantly. There was no way that she could not. The slightly hunched posture, the long robes, and enormous hands; a living Chozo shuffled along behind the armed Pirate Elites.

A silent roar was surging in Samus' ears, deafening her thoughts. The lone impossible Chozo was marched along, followed by the watch of a full platoon of massive battle droids who followed behind, weapons trained. Then the prisoner detail crossed that sliver of Samus' view and were gone. Samus was left in the dark and the starlight.

It was impossible. The Chozo were gone; vanished, departed. The last vestigial trace of that long fallen empire and had been lost decades ago. Every space-faring race in this galactic arm had been hunting for any clue and had found nothing to explain it. She had found nothing. Thirty years since she'd seen the last living members, and across the galaxy she'd only found statues, bones, and ghosts. The entire fading race had simply left, off to their mysterious new journey. All that remained were machines, carved prophecy, and one half-breed hatchling wandering around their discarded leavings.

It was impossible, and yet a living Chozo had just walked in front of her. That was what the Pirates had found. Somewhere out in space this fleet of cultists and madmen had stumbled onto the trail of the departed Chozo masters. That mysterious cube on the Command Ship hadn't been empty, it had been exited. The Pirates didn't need to rip apart old technology when they had a captive they could enslave to make new.

Peaceful certainty returned to Samus' mind. This was a clear purpose. Everything in her existence had led her to be perfectly situated in this one moment. She would rescue this prisoner and die or live in the process. There were no decisions to be made here. She tilted her helmet to look off over her right shoulder. The visor's enhancements sliced through the dark night and so she could clearly see the head of the distant mountain statue just barely preening over the north canyon wall. Somewhere in her memory, her adopted family were nodding their approval.

These pirates would learn once more to fear the wrath of the Chozo.

Samus took one step back and a tiny icon blinked in the corner of her vision. It was a transmission; a new transmission. It was faint, and garbled from bouncing off canyon walls, but it was there.

A voice broke in, small and scared and unmistakably human. "Hello? Aurora Unit? I...I need help. We got away but... but my mom's hurt. We ran to the Ruins, the Chozo place, past the locked door. Everyone else...We're hiding. I went somewhere else to make this call but...I need you to find me. There are things out there. Someone? Please. I'm Roger. Help."

Then the signal was gone and Samus stood alone in the dark.

...


	10. True Nature

...

Strands of Samus' long blonde hair blew into her eyes but she ignored them. Both her hands were currently occupied gripping into the black basalt rock face, bare fingers white and red with that precious rasp of pain which meant she still had grip. Her half-covered limbs trembled but each inch up this rough cliff face was another bit of triumph, so she breathed deep and could barely remember the years when this acidic air had burned her lungs. In the distance, dark clouds rolled in over the hills, creeping up to strangle the sun. Clouds meant rain, and here on Zebes that rain meant death for anything without a diamond carapace.

Of course those sharp rocks thirty feet beneath her also meant death, so Samus continued to climb. A heavy bracelet of bulbous metal hung off each forearm, sliding and shifting awkwardly with every movement she made. They were very inconvenient and made this climb much more difficult, but they were her weapons so Samus kept them on, even as they jangled on her skinny forearms. Her muscles burned slightly from exertion but that lay over a more persistent gentle ache in her bones these days that came whenever she sat still. Samus guessed that ache had something to do with growing; she'd been getting a lot taller recently even though that meant all her limbs were really skinny now. Sometimes she thought she might be eleven years old now, but she tried not to think like that.

That was how humans thought.

Up here on the cliff, a thin rock ledge allowed Samus space to fit both her feet if she lined them up just right so she crouched down and caught her breath as she balanced with one hand gripping a stone crack. She was almost at the top. She'd need her strength up there.

Casually perched on the sheer cliff like a nesting falcon, Samus reached around her head to re-catch the stray bits of hair which had slipped free from their ponytail prison. That done, she smoothly sprang up from the little ledge to grab a just out of reach handhold. Her palm came down on target and the grip was good but Samus abruptly realized that the rock lip was a lot sharper than it had looked from below. The broken rock was edged like a knife. Her whole weight came down on that hand and a gasp of pain burst out her lungs.

Samus' teeth pressed together in a rictus as she had no choice but to hold tight and swing a dangling foot up for another purchase before she could mercifully release some of the blade-like pressure on her palm. Her other hand found a crack and she could lift the throbbing hand to inspect it. There were only a few spots of blood, though her fingers were trembling and refused to fully extend. It was a good thing the Chozo had made her skin harder to cut. Something about things in her body making a pattern of carbon. They still used a lot of words she didn't know.

Old Bird had advocated the procedure over Grey Voice's hesitance, saying that Samus didn't have enough blood in her little body to lose as much as she insisted on doing through the constant falls, scrapes, and bite wounds of childhood. Well, he'd somehow managed to say something to that effect, even though Samus had heard just four grunted words. So, despite Grey Voice's hesitance, Samus had gone back in the tank.

She'd wanted them to strengthen her bones at the same time, particularly since that particular tank trip had been first been initiated by her ninth broken arm. Fixing them was getting rather annoying. However, to that Old Bird had just said, "No."

Grey Voice hadn't even said that much but gave her more biology texts to read and put her in a corner for hours of study until it occurred to Samus that growth spurts and unbreakable bones might not mix. The Chozo never bothered to explain anything when they felt she already had the information necessary to deduce it. That was kind of like trust, but it was also very irritating. She'd gone hungry for days back when Grey Voice had abruptly stopped preparing food for her. Samus supposed she should have been paying better attention to what labor went into her sustenance, but she still thought keeping the raw ingredients on a twelve foot high shelf was just being intentionally difficult.

After more one surge up the cliff, Samus finally clambered over the last lip onto a broad shelf just below the top of the mountain. The oblong metal bulges on her dangling bracelets scraped and tapped on the black rock as she crawled to her knees. She stayed here for a moment, face to the ground, breathing heavily. Then another sound joined her panting. Samus slowly looked up to see the end of a metal staff tapping on the stone in front of her.

Old Bird looked down at her with faint disapproval. He flicked his eyes over at the sun, indicating that she was late. Of corse they were here first, they were always there first. Samus never saw either of the teachers pass her on these trips but no matter what destination they set across the sprawling temple complex from the depths to the peaks, they were always there first without the slightest sign of effort.

Samus just grunted and crouched down at Old Bird's feet as she eyed him suspiciously. She didn't know what today's lesson was and that was never a good sign. Her sore fingers ran over the oversized bracelet on her wrist as she kept her eyes on her teacher. The bracelets were ancient weapons, sized for Chozo warriors twice her height. They could protect her from anything. Samus just wish she had any idea how to make them work or what they did.

She waited.

There. The scrape of metal on stone as Old Bird's staff suddenly whipped into blinding motion. Samus sprang to the side, rolling up as the staff smashed down where she'd just sat, sending out flying shards. Then she jumped up, flipping back as the staff's next swing scourged a long scratch in the black rock beneath her. So, it was one of these lessons. Samus landed, bare feet sliding across the stone. She smiled, she liked these lessons.

The staff flipped and twirled through the air, tricking the eye as it seemed to flex and strike like a serpent. It was an illusion, aided by the way that Old Bird barely seemed to move more than a single hand as he continued his attack. Well, Samus would just have to fix that.

In the middle of the next dodge, she reached down and grabbed a loose rock about the size of her head. She spun and threw it right at Old Bird's chest. He easily stepped away, but that simple motion shifted the mental balance of their conflict. Samus had injected her will into this flow of the universe instead of only reacting. She just wished her arms were a little stronger, she knew that Old Bird could really have just swatted a rock that small out of the air if he wasn't humoring her. But she was still just a kid, even under the best conditions she'd just recently gotten to the point where she could lift an eighty pound weight more than ten times.

The dance up on top of the cliff had entered into a rhythm. Samus panted but she could easily maintain this speed for at least another forty-five seconds, keeping her eye on that flashing, twirling staff. Then the air beside Old Bird shimmered and he suddenly reached out to grab a second metal staff that materialized out of nothing. That new weapon whipped down as Samus realized she was in mid motion, too off balance to dodge this. The tip of the staff crashed down on her hand as it was briefly splayed against the rock during a handspring. The metal hit, and her finger bone snapped.

Pain screamed through her nerves. That was bad. Pain confused reflexes, muddled thoughts even if a single shattered finger was hardly a significant handicap for this kind of challenge. Pain made you predictable. Fighting this, Samus struggled for distance, trying to keep sight on both staffs now. There were tears in her eyes, another unfortunate side effect of pain which made this difficult. Difficult even if Old Bird didn't just then toss one of his staffs up high into the sky and then reach to materialize yet a third weapon out of shimmering air. Samus just had time to wrench her eyes down from the twirling staff when the new threat smashed into her ribs.

Resignation dominated Samus' mind as a cracking sensation signaled a new surge of pain. This lesson was ridiculously uneven, even for Old Bird. She would have even said "unfair" if both her teachers hadn't rigorously impressed in her that such a concept was just another illusion. They'd sent her up this cliff to tire her out, then hidden an entire armory behind the air just for Old Bird to use while Samus only had these stupid bracelets that she didn't even know what they were supposed to...

Oh.

The air shimmered with dancing, shattering light as a new metal staff slid into existence, right as Samus spun past to catch it in her hand. She slid to a stop as she faced Old Bird, panting in defiance of her cracked rib. For at least this moment the pain was thoroughly subsumed beneath exhilaration. Grey Voice had explained the process of retrieving hidden things almost one hundred days ago and Samus was quite astonished that she'd actually remembered it when she thought to look.

She now gripped her new staff in two hands in preparation for her own attack, ignoring the broken finger since she was still too small and weak to twirl the staff in one palm like Old Bird could. But Old Bird did not continue his assault, and instead simply caught his other staff as it came spinning down from the sky. He smoothly gripped all three weapons together in one huge hand and then gestured for Samus to come over. Samus complied, suddenly wincing and gasping as the intensity of the fight vanished to leave only the pain behind. Old Bird held out one of his long fingers, now capped in metal, and ran it down across Samus' cheek and neck. A few heartbeats later the twin pains were pushed back, receding to a forgotten throb.

A rough clicking chirp sounded out behind her and Samus turned to see Grey Voice standing on the mountain too, hunching his shoulders disapprovingly in Old Bird's direction. Grey Voice never liked it when Old Bird broke Samus' bones but Samus flashed back a broad panting smile to show that she was fine. The only thing that resulted in was Grey Voice now disapproving of her in equal measure.

He clicked his beak at Samus as he strode forward. Then he took his position and said, "The heart." It was a question dressed as a command.

Samus easily supplied the answer. "Energy is matter, matter is life, life is thought, and thought is energy. Past and future are the same present. All devisions are an illusion."

Grey Voice didn't give praise for mere recitation, but still Samus could see some of his thin remaining feathers puff up a bit. Old Bird didn't look back at them but he gave a slight cough that might have been a scoff at his companion.

After only a brief glare at his companion, Grey Voice continued, "Just as the past will always exist, so has the future always existed. Any action you take stands on a foundation of those two facts. By examining the present and the past, the future can be just as visible. Surprises like that," he gestured to the staff Samus held. On cue her injuries twinged slightly in sympathy. "...they should not be allowed to occur."

Samus couldn't help grumbling a bit. "It's easier for you. You have a thousand years of past."

As soon as she said it she winced as she knew she was wrong. She'd slipped back into the human way of thinking again: in years and dates and math composed of numbers instead of words. But Grey Voice didn't discipline her, and replied softly after a pause. "Years are a meaningless term. When describing a mind, doubly so. The only true devision is marked by when look back on your past and do not recognize the individual making the thoughts in your own head." He flicked a hand out towards Old Bird with what Samus could have sworn was a smirk. "By that number he is sixty-seven."

"You are nineteen," Old Bird replied, barely passing his eyes over Grey Voice. Both seemed to be using the other's number, high or low, as an insult.

Samus frowned a bit at this whole exchange. She always had to be careful and make sure the teachers weren't setting up logical traps for her to fall into. Grey Voice's lectures were often as treacherous as Old Bird's games. However, she still needed to stand up for herself so she said, "But experience's still valuable. With experience comes a chance for understanding. You've both gotten the immortality treatments so you've got an advantage over pretty much anyone who doesn't. More time to learn."

Then she took a breath as she prepared another question. It was one that she had waited a long time to ask. "Are you going to give me the treatments too?"

Here Grey Voice looked over at Old Bird, now with a more pleading expression. As always, Old Bird declined to take a larger role in the conversation. Grey Voice sighed, "That is uncertain. The process is a decision of grave import. By moral design, to give endless life, the ability to create is lost. There is time yet for you to assess that choice."

Samus resisted the urge to squirm in front of them. She knew the science of what they were referring to but when the focus was turned on herself it was still a strange and hazy subject. It lived in the genetic part of her brain, the part which missed humans even as her memories of them grew blurry at the edges. She wasn't even sure what it was she dreamed of some of those nights in the nest bed.

So she shrugged it off. "I know, biological fertility. That's not my path."

"Do you see your path?"

Samus had expected this but still her breath caught in her chest. This was a keystone moment. She stepped forward and planted her metal staff on the black rock. "To be a warrior of the Chozo." This was the first time she'd dared to vocalize what had been growing for years behind her eyes

But Grey Voice hung his head and even Old Bird turned away. That was the wrong answer. Why, Samus could't understand. That was what Old Bird had once been, it was what he was training her to be now. Even Grey Voice's lessons were clearly centered around a life of challenge and combat ranging across the galaxy. Samus had seen the old murals, endless lines of Chozo in brilliant, deadly armor. She'd seen the etched lines of ships that ripped moons apart, of lone fighters who could stand against entire armies, and armies that could stand against multi-system species. She'd seen that this vanguard created the sheltering wings of peace that allowed the rest of the galaxy to prosper. That was obviously her purpose.

But Grey Voice said, "The Chozo are gone."

Samus' eyebrows came together. "No, you're not."

Only silence and the sound of wind followed. Samus felt her frustration wrap into a ball behind her throat. The first round of painkillers began to wane and she could feel her broken finger and ribs start to return to awareness.

She stepped forward. "We're still here. Three of us. I'm Chozo too."

"No."

Old Bird's grunt stabbed far more painfully than any splinter of shattered bone. Samus gripped tighter onto the staff that she had pulled from behind the air. The storm grew closer and the air tasted like acid.

Old Bird turned back from the cliff. His beak softly clicked. "You are human." Samus felt her stomach weaken. Her bones hurt. Then he continued, "You are human and you are Chozo. You are more things than you have yet to become. You are you."

Anger rose up and Samus spat back, furious that they used the same kind of lines she was so often chastised for. "That doesn't mean anything! That's a tautology!" Grey Worm punished any line of argument from her that even veered towards circular logic and yet that's what they told her now?

Beside her Grey Voice let out a long, grunting sigh. His breath whistled faintly. "Yellow Hatchling, all of existence is a tautology. That is the core of meaning itself."

Samus opened her mouth again, but Grey Voice raised one large, long fingered hand. "The storm approaches. We now return inside."

Samus glanced over at the dark approaching clouds that now filled most of the sky above. A grey curtain seemed to draw across the ground beneath it. Then she glanced down at the way she had climbed up. Rain. The math between those two predictable velocities was as easy as it was unpleasant. She grimaced. She was going to lose most of her outer skin on this trip, but it was her fault for letting her teachers tarry here in another web of questions. Oh well, she turned to start to descend toward the first foot-hold.

A scraping sound of stone on stone made her look up. Grey Voice had vanished and Old Bird now stood in an new doorway that had just swiveled open out of a piece of blank rock on the mountain face. Inside was clearly a staircase descending down. Samus hung her head in exasperation as she walked back over to him. His instruction had only been, "Go to the top of the mountain." Climbing had been her own interpretation. Evidently Old Bird had decided that she should have already discovered this particular secret passage.

She shoved past him, not looking at his face which she reluctantly knew would be beaming with humor. Inside, the tunnel was effective a dark shaft ringed with carved steps.

She made her way down the steep stone stairs, narrow and sized for legs much longer than hers. It was very dark, with only the faintest glowing symbols on ancient etchings to allow sight at all. Samus' hard-won staff clinked on each step beside her, sketching out the shaft in echoes. Then, far below lights began to grow more frequent and more intense. The murals of dead, completed prophecies began to give way to current habitation and metal things.

Then she stepped out of the now revealed secret door into a long familiar hallway. A warm orange light washed out from unseen sources. The ceiling spoke to her:

"Hello, Samus."

Samus smiled in an indiscriminate direction, knowing that the engulfing presence would receive it. There was only one voice here that called her by her name. It was a nice gesture, even from a computer.

"Hello, Mother," she replied.

...

Samus heard the child's voice, radio waves bouncing across the night shrouded colony buildings and dark canyon walls.

"Help me, someone. My name's Roger and I'm scared."

She was already running, armor straining in the race away from that distant sighting of the impossible. With each pounding step the miraculous living Chozo was left further behind. How could that be? No, the mystery would remain after the immediate threat was dealt with. How did these pirates find what Samus had failed to find through decades of searching? That wasn't important. Where had the Chozo been? She had to move faster.

Her mind flashed back the Pirate command ship; a Chozo made cube, empty with a hollow center. The cube had been abandoned and unused, because it's cargo had already been removed. It's passenger had been removed. Now he stood on this same ground, and she was running away from him.

She shook her head in her sprint. The child had said that he and his mother were in the ruins, the excavation site. The map flashed in front of her eyes, blue lines floating into existence as dark hallways blurred past her. The closest entrance to the temple complex was in the center of the three canyons that forked off the top of the colony valley. It was back the way she'd just came. How had this child gotten so far away so quickly? There must have been some fast transport method known to the colonists. Some secret informal short-cut not included on the official maps.

Samus sprang her forward and tucked up her legs as a wide plane of glass shattered against the suit's metal skin. A constellation of shards briefly twinkled around her, spinning fragments sparkling in the street lamps and starlight. Then she hit the ground and paving bricks crumbled under her toes as she launched into a sprint once more. The canyon wall was at her left separating her from her destination, a barrier of living rock ten times taller than the greatest structure of concrete and metal that the humans had raised here. It's sculptor was the huge volcano and the very planet itself.

Except for that one part. Out of the corner of her eye, Samus spotted a Chozo era statue worked out of the living rock of the canyon. To most eyes it would look like just another of the many vaguely defined Chozo shapes that dotted this scene of their ancient home. Meaningless self-glorification kneeling down on one knee with outstretched arms. But nothing in this entire universe was meaningless. Samus exhaled gently as her boot swiveled on the street and bit into the pavement as she bolted off in that new direction. She recognized an abnormal aspect to the larger than life stone Chozo's posture, a silent language from an artist two thousand years ago. So she darted between pillar-like legs and zigged back around a fold of carved robe into a concealed tunnel behind. A long dark shaft stabbed out through the valley wall, straight towards the center canyon; straight toward the temple entrance. A shortcut. Samus exhaled with satisfaction as she raced down it, building to her top speed once more.

Scan picked up faint traces on the tunnel floor ahead of her. Several individuals had passed this way recently, making it likely she was on the trail of the colonists who had escaped Ridley. With each step into the shielding rock, the suit's background analysis grew quieter as the various waves of communication from planet and space all faded away. Then Samus was just left with her own breathing and the sound of her footsteps striking the stone floor.

She burst out the other side into the night. The south end of this new canyon, the center branch of three, was half filled with several of the huge dome-like buildings of the Research Center campus. A warning briefly flashes in Samus' visor as a very distant floating shape was briefly visible between two of those structures. Metroid, out looking for surviving prey or more pirate sacrifices.

Samus turned away from that as she ran up the canyon towards the prime Chozo site. This narrow valley was clearly one of the landforms with volcanic origin, as within a few hundred yards the space was already contracting. High up above, flanges of stone projected out from each canyon lip, gnashing the sky like teeth, remnants of a former roof to this massive lava tunnel. However, sometime in the millions of years after the eruption, that tunnel had become a watercourse and some departed stream had carved down at the floor creating a narrow floor beneath a wider bench halfway up the walls. As Samus hurried along that lowest floor she could see structures of stone and metal up there, habitations built into the shape of the land as if they only half existed. Chozo buildings.

This path along the bottom was meant to be walked. To the immortal Chozo any errand that was not worth walking to was not worth doing, even if the distance was a hundred miles. The discoveries of immortality and prophecy had rather eroded that species' sense of urgency by the end. However, somewhere along the line here the humans had injected their own timeframes and so widened and paved the winding foot path into a nice straight road. Now, as Samus' jog reached thirty miles per hour she had to admit she was leaning towards the human opinion on time.

Suddenly the old narrow river course opened up on each side as in front of Samus' path the canyon's dark open reaches came to a very decisive end. A wall lay in front of her, a hundred and fifty feet tall, reaching up to where the canyon's roof reformed shutting out the stars. The wall stretched across the canyon like the end of the world, each side sprouting a statue of stone and metal as tall as the entire wall. In the center the glowing patterns and faint lights etched out a massive portal just barely visible in the night, locked and barred. The way was shut.

The huge amphitheater space in front of the door and wall was filled with modular white and blue Federation buildings, evidently a major workplace for the colony researchers. They'd even brought their own power supplies up here. Samus noticed that several strings of those cables snaked off towards the terminus walls before ending limply on the ground outside the door, snapped and broken. The gateway had been shut in a hurry. That at least fit with what Samus had heard on the coms.

As if on cue human radio transmission broke through, much closer and stronger this time. "Hello? Aurora unit? Anyone? Please, I need help! My mom is hurt and we're stuck back here? I don't know how to get the temple door back open from this side. Please, help me! There's a lot of blood."

Samus looked up at the massive wall. The boy Roger's transmission was coming from the other side, but she couldn't risk responding. The pirates could hear every open transmission here, if they knew she was at the Temple door already they might just blanket this valley with missiles. All she could do was work quickly and then try to get the colonists out even quicker.

She looked left and right, the suit's scan attacking each nearby federation computer. unfortunately, the humans emergency procedures had gotten ahead of her here; all the data she was searching for was wiped in some early stage of the attack. She would have to re-solve the door the old fashioned way. The two massive flanking statues seemed to stare down at her, the pale light from their dimly glowing eyes painting the beaked faces into the night's shadows. On each, one hand stretched outwards to the wider world, warding or welcoming with palms larger than Samus' entire body. On the other side, one hand lifted up and one sank down, the carved naturalistic postures reaching for something just out of grasp.

The suit was able to extract some small bits of the Federation's research. The first told the name of this complex. However, Samus didn't need the little box of text which floated into her vision, she could easily read the glowing orange letters etched in the wall one hundred and fifty feet of the valley floor. The Chozo had always been mercurial in what exactly they considered a secret.

The ten-foot high words shone out, seeming to levitate in the void of night. Translations from Chozo to human standard were sometimes easy, sometimes deceptively difficult. An example lay in the first of these two words, " _Temple_ ". Chozo didn't worship anything, but they revered everything. Chozo didn't need faith, but they created it. Chozo had no religion, until they made every aspect of their reality into a religion in which they were at once the highest gods and lowest sinners. The implication of the label on this wall was at once " _laboratory_ ", " _refuge_ ", " _vault_ ", and " _school_ ". For humans, " _Temple_ " was close enough.

The other half of the translation was even trickier. In fact, Samus could almost feel the intent to confuse across the weave of time. This wall was thousands and thousands of years old. By Samus' scan it might have been the oldest Chozo settlement she'd ever found, and yet it had evidently been in use right up until the very end. The question was, for what use? Here the name only taunted her, this temple of an inscrutable cause, dating from long before the obvious interpretation. This was the temple of the searcher, of the warrior, of the hunger, of the hunter.

To a human tongue, that word was pronounced " _metroid_."

The feel of dramatic irony was always rather grating.

A new broadcast crackled across the air, and Samus spun back in surprise as she realized it was coming from the Research Compound. Despite all her former concern for the security and secrecy of the five thousand remaining people Aurora held in her sanctum, the bio-computer now spoke out into the air for all to hear.

"Aran, the temple door must remain closed."

Samus continued to examine the solid horizon of that carved wall. Far over at the side, beside the legs of the massive statue, an older instillation of Federation equipment showed one of their initial attempts at tackling this same problem. Scan revealed faint traces of past drilling. The suit suggested one small hole, just enough to snake through some electrical instruments or basic drones. Unfortunately, that would not help her now. That drill was was typical of humans; they encountered a complex riddle and their first reaction was to just power past it with focused violence. Despite the urgency, Samus smirked to no one. Truth was, if not for the current mission constraints her first reaction to this door would have been a sustain barrage of every type of weaponry she could muster. That did end up being the answer about half the time. Instead she continued looking and inspecting.

This deep and narrow canyon at night was practically a cave. The faint remaining lights of the Chozo carvings and the Federation electrics looked like the colony webs of two dueling species of luminescent fungi across the floor and walls. A faint breeze curled down the brush the dust here. Then through that same cold night air, Aurora's broadcast returned.

"Pirate communications have revealed the casualties among the revealed shelter inhabitants. That is tragic but it means the most important mission objective must be to to keep advanced technology out of Pirate hands. The temple is currently sealed and keeping them out, this state of affairs must be allowed to continue."

Samus wondered if Aurora had picked up any of her interactions with the computers here at the door, or if the bio-computer was just guessing what she might be doing after hearing Roger's transmission. Guessing accurately, Samus had to admit, but anyone with an access to her file would probably have made the same conclusion. Aurora was right of course, only the Pirates had a Chozo captive who they'd just brought to the planet surface. This vault door was about to become a beaded curtain and the Federation forces had no way of knowing that yet. Samus continued to work.

"Please, Aran. In all likelihood the Pirates are taking advantage of this transmission to lead you into a trap that advances their plans. Aran, please acknowledge."

Another great guess, Aurora was on a roll. This Ridley had spent most of the day verbally taunting her, of course he would be wracking his brain to figure out how to use Roger's transmission against her. Suit analysis of micro-signatures in the transmission at least gave a high probability that it was a real juvenile human mouth making those sounds rather than some Pirate computer faking the whole thing. She still was expecting an ambush to collapse on her at any moment, but what did it matter? She had to save the child. If you understand your own nature, you understand just how few choices there really were.

Aurora was sounding desperate though. There had to be a lot of underlying direct orders at play to make an incredibly powerful AI sound like it was struggling with an issue. What exactly had the federation found in this Temple of the Hunter? What was so terrifying compared to what these Pirates had already demonstrated? Samus needed to know, since with the Chozo in hand Ridely would have it soon enough. This temple was huge, and if Samus remembered the satellite map correctly, it had three main entrances, one in each of the main branch canyons. This door was simply the closest.

A super missile barrage against the door sounded more appealing by the second. The good news is that the Chozo were great fans of security through obscurity and so there was undoubtably a way for a stranger in a Chozo battle suit to open this. She just had to hope that it wasn't a way for someone in an _undamaged_ Chozo battle suit to open this.

Her scans traced an invisible web of different materials and thermal sensors showed deliberately unshielded conduits behind the armored surface of both the door and the two huge statues. It would have been really useful if Aurora had include the temple data on the data dump she'd given when they'd had that hard wired connection. The Federation's attitude towards "need to know" was always infuriating. Samus always got it in the end but the process really racked up her felony record.

The statues' eyes were glowing so Samus shot them. That didn't seem to do anything. Then she set herself to climbing up the metal robe of the flanking statue who's hand reached towards the earth instead of the sky. The general idea was that the Chozo loved making their keys inconvenient to reach.

Aurora's shielded facility began broadcasting again. "I am forwarding a transmission from Commander Nakamura." Samus' eyebrows came together as she examined the back of this metal palm larger than a transport van. The Federation forces really were concerned.

There was a brief pause as Aurora's broadcast signature flicked to relay a different ID. Then a female voice whispered over the electric spectrum. "Um, hello? Hello, who is this? My com just turned on. Hello? Is this regarding my request for those file declassifications on Aran's case?"

Clinging to her perch fifty feet up, Samus couldn't help smiling. Hello, Officer Yin. How are you?

It didn't sound like Yin had slept either. Samus could hear the nearly silent tremble of vocal cords stressed by exertion and stimulants. Yin said, "Records? Only there's no ID on this call or-"

There was a brief click and then Nakamura's rather angry voice took over. "Damn it, it does outgoing calls too? Aran, if you survive this I might want to murder you for what you did to my com system."

Samus was starting to like Nakamura, for all the secret goals hiding behind his words. She hoped it was the pirates who had released the metroids on this world. She'd be disappointed now if she had to kill the captain. More disappointed since she had no idea how she'd manage it from here. At the moment she had other problems, including this one band of red stone on the statue arm that was conductive to electricity for some reason.

Nakamura sounded tired too. Of course probably hadn't half shredded many of his vital organs during an uncontrolled planetary reentry but the battle had to have been stressful for him too. "I know the pirates can hear us, so you can't safely reply, but you can still listen to us."

Samus frowned at a bit of ancient engraved writing that decorated the wall. " _The weight of your sins will rise to the fall of..._ " Did that clue mean to go up or to go down?

Somewhere in space, the Commander sighed, "There are lives at risk down on the planet. I know. But if these Pirates manage to incorporate even more Chozo technology then everyone on this ship, everyone in this sector is at risk. Analysis came back on that attack from the Pirate capital ship and it was Chozo wave-beam technology. They've cracked some code in a way even the Federation hasn't managed."

Ah, she had it! If she analyzed the last line of that poem the it meant that she just had to...No, wait, that was just the name of the door's Chozo designer. Samus clonked her helmet's forehead against the rock in frustration.

Nakamura was still talking, "Thwarting the Pirate forces must be your top priority. It must be your only priority. Aran, I'm afraid that's an order. Do you understand?"

Samus jerked back from her latest experiment poking at the statues, the suit's shield sizzling. Why and how was that thing full of acid?! She hopped back and landed down on the canyon floor with a thump as the dust shook from the impact of her boots. She glanced up and back, at the night sky framed above the distant Research Compound. Someone up in those stars Diomedes was slowly repairing, however it sounded like it still might be a few hours.

It also sounded like Nakamura had read a psych profile of hers somewhere. He was talking like Adam, though he hadn't risked calling her "lady" yet. She couldn't blame him for that, it was a legitimate psychological tactic when faced with a difficult command. But her eyebrows came together all the same.

Samus stepped back and looked at the massive wall as a whole. Then her eyes focused on one precise point that was suddenly very clear to her. She'd found the key. She raised her weapon. Nakamura was right, she was being an idiot. Against everything else on the line, Roger and his wounded mother were paltry feathers to weigh down that scale. But Samus also knew herself and she knew what she would do. It was inevitable, and still she hesitated.

Floating text blinked into sight on her visor. " _Your path lies before you._ "

The suit's malfunction was here again. Again it was offering opinions and judgments in a strangely living wording. Was it worth it to hope for one particular explanation?

" _Do you understand? Yes/No_ "

A tired smile ticked at the corner of Samus' mouth. Her thumb swept to the left.

 _"Then let's get going, Lady._ "

Samus fired. Burning energy splashed across the hidden keystone and eldrich Chozo circuits glowed into life, signaling that she had solved the puzzle. It was always nice when shooting worked.

The door rumbled open to a massive stone hall that slumbered in a bath of dim reddish light.

In that moment Roger's transmission crackled to life again, his little voice quick and happy. "Thank you very much, Samus Aran." Samus' heart faltered. The child had never known her name. "You are as effective as always." Off to the side of the inner room, beside where the Federation had drilled that tiny hole through the wall there was a single small remote transmitter lying on the ground where it had been poked in from outside; a Pirate made transmitter.

Samus took a deep breath as she heard the pounding advance of armored feet charging up the canyon behind her. The reaches of the silent temple took those hundred sounds and knitted their echoes together into a soft thrum. It drifted off through the winding halls ahead like the quick heartbeat of a small creature. Inside the deserted temple, it found no answer. Samus breathed out.

Then she turned back and fired.

...


	11. The Last Equation

...

Blaster fire lanced around her cover, splashing off corners in a spray of blackened stone. Samus checked her suit's display in the corner of her eye as she knelt behind this block of basalt beside a newly broken piece of Federation research tech. At least ten of the attacking Pirates were within scan range and the whistling approach of another missile barrage indicated the rest were waiting just beyond. Samus twisted and leaped to the side as her former hiding place exploded into fire and shrapnel.

Tiny shards of glowing metal peppered her back, draining the shields slightly until the slowed fragments bounced off her suit's metal skin. The brief shield glow melded with the soft red light that dominated this long hall of towering pillars and silent watchful engravings. Many of these carved Chozo held their own weapons, ready for this war that came only a few thousand years too late.

Samus pushed these thoughts to the back of her mind as her weapon found another target and unleashed a punishing eruption. She'd been tricked, and she'd been tricked because she had behaved predictably. Just as Nakamura had warned, the Pirates had used their knowledge of her personal history to set up this trap, laying the bait of a lone child surviving a brutal pirate raid on a ruined colony. The levers of her mind were all too obvious. How had they secured Roger's cooperation? Scan still said that his transmissions were from a real child's mouth, not a computer simulation, and Aurora would have known if the identity had been faked contrary to the colony population, but Samus didn't have time to worry about that right now. She had a fight and she let that be the whole of her attention.

The attacking Pirates were fearsome, they were well armed, and they died; one by one. Their curses and screams filled the com frequencies until some stupid field lieutenant evidently decide to remotely shut off the coms on his forward soldiers. Those forces died even faster after that, cut off from intel about the blazing armored meteor that raced among them, but at least that dying was quieter for those who stood in the back. At Ridley wasn't here; a being his size couldn't exactly hide anywhere in this. Strange, Samus would have thought he would loved to gloat over her.

Samus stood behind a stone column, looming over the smoking enemy that lay in this corner, cracked against the wall like a turtle in the road. Underneath the calm beat of battle meditation Samus' breathing was growing heavier. Her right arm inside the power beam was now uncomfortably hot; in its current state the suit couldn't keep up with all the heat this prolonged gunfight was generating. Despite everything, the Pirates were still advancing, slowly making their way into this long red hall.

She would have to give ground. Even with all this death around her, the suit's energy reserves were dropping sharply and she didn't have time to grind these fallen armors into alloy fragments for more missile seeds. So she bolted; racing for that distant glowing octagonal door that led deeper into the temple. Her gun raised, a missile launched off in a white streak, and to Samus' surprise it smoothly passed through the shimmering blue energy barrier without a ripple. Huh, apparently that was not actually a door, just a screen to keep the heat in. She winced as she heard her missile explode against something fragile sounding deep inside the temple even as more hostile missiles erupted on the hallway floor directly behind her, courtesy of the furious Pirates.

Explosions chased her through the open doorway and Samus ducked to the side, just barely dodging the next volley of blinding blaster fire that rained sideways through the portal. She needed to figure out some way to drive the Pirates back or cut them off from their supply lines. A quick glance back out to the hallway cost her a shot to the helmet that further drained the shields and set her ears ringing. However, she'd seen that the Pirates were pausing too, setting up a quick defensive line within the temple hall as they lugged in shield generators and other supplies. In the very back of their formation, almost black against the night outside, Samus had barely made out the looming bulk of a squad of Pirate Elite armored suits, advancing among the other soldiers like walking tanks.

Taking advantage of this brief pause, Samus belatedly thought to look around at her own surroundings. This second temple room was much larger, no longer a hallway but a vast open chamber. Past the circular walkway Samus found herself on the whole room seemed to be shaped like a massive sphere. The cavernous interior space was occupied by a vertical structure, something like a spindle composed of a dozen jointed metal arms, spinning rings, and gears all rotating around a central column eight stories tall. It made no sound but a faint hum as the whole complex device continued to move through the rotating patterns of a slow endless dance. Its spindle's burnished metal surface glimmered faintly in the low yellow lights that bloomed and died on the chamber walls whenever one of the huge arms passed close by.

Samus had no idea what that thing was. Her home on Zebes had never exactly been a center of technology for the Chozo civilization, and with her past experience in Chozo "minimalism" this device could be a star harvester or a vegetable peeler with equal likelihood. But Adam's reconstituted mind was waking up in the suit so she finally had someone she could ask to help, someone who could read through the reams of data without suffering from the mundane distraction of currently being shot at.

"Adam, scan analysis of possible function?"

Text appeared in her eyes, " _Fate sets your advance to terminal genesis. Press on._ "

All right, maybe Adam wasn't actually awake yet. Rebuilding a mind from only a 54% download was bound to take a while, especially in an alien architecture like the suit's Chozo computing. Of course, the base principles behind the Federation's electronic resurrection program were an outgrowth of the Aurora designs, who were in turn founded on the lessons learned from Chozo biocomputers. It made sense that his fragments might be talking like them. Sometimes if seemed like the whole galaxy was playing the the Chozo's abandoned leavings.

Samus' wandering train of thought shook back onto the rails as a new and sudden screech echoed through the temple. She twisted back towards the door to the entry hall, the sound had come from that direction. Or rather, the _sounds_. She recognized those hungry, crackling shrieks. This temple entrance were just at the edge of the colony wide sacrificial cordon Ridley had constructed of his own soldiers, but the prowling metroids had still smelled this feast of life and death. Calls rang out through the narrow canyon outside. The hungry beasts were coming.

The Pirates' weapons now pointed in the opposite direction, away from Samus, lighting the dark canyon in flashes and streaks as frantic blaster fire hailed out the temple door. The huge door itself began to slowly close again but it was too late as three distant flying shapes swooped inside and crashed among the rearmost Pirate forces. Samus added her own fire, leaping out from cover to pelt the Pirate forces from the other side, hoping to keep them pressed against the metroid meat grinder. However, a single weapon's worth of shots, no matter how precise, couldn't suppress a small army that would unanimously prefer getting their heads blown off to what now lay behind them. They charged at Samus, oblivious to her fire.

Samus had to turn and run as well. Building speed towards the chamber's central void, she reached the edge and leaped up to on the nearest long mechanical arm as it rotated near the equatorial balcony. That metal clanged and sank under her as she landed, then her weight suddenly increased as the mechanism rose up, lifting her swiftly towards the upper dome in a wide rotation. Here and there behind her little bits of federation equipment, sensors likely, clung to the central spindle like white-shelled parasites. Then Samus left all that behind as the rotating arm carried her up along the ceiling. The dome glowed with letters as she passed.

A constant chatter of panicked Pirate communications swirled around her head but Samus ignored all this as she found herself sliding up through a drifting constellation of floating orange symbols that bloomed and died in the air around her. It was writing, a swirling world of script and data the burst from slumber as the machine stroked across the dome. Down below the pirates were beginning to spill out of the entrance hallway but up in her sweeping course Samus let them be and tried to decipher this silent storm of whispers. It was too fast; her eyes could only read scattered blurring words here and there, but the suit scan swallowed it whole as the mechanism's arm began to rotate faster and faster.

She wondered what this room could be. She looked around, trying to make some sense of this gale of information. Suddenly she staggered as she found herself blinded, every inch of her visor filled overlapping blue text flashing and changing within the second. However, a second later it was over and the wall of text vanished. Samus waited, tense and panting as the arm rotated.

Her perch began to plunge. Samus crouched down and caught hold of a lip in the metal as she suddenly found herself racing back down towards the distracted Pirate forces fleeing out onto the equatorial balcony. The nearest were stood gaping up at the swirling heart of the sphere chamber, unable to decipher its immensity and unclear purpose. However, Samus' charged beam-shot at the foremost's head did wonders for focusing their thoughts. At least her weapon was still working normally.

Shouts and return fire followed her as the spindle arm swiftly dipped down below their sight. Down here in this lower hemisphere the words continued to swirl in blooming death. There were also rings of floating platforms rotating down here. From time to time one dipped out of the circuit to stop near the wall and a short crackling beam of blue energy shimmered out to tether it. A brief cloud of words shimmered around it and then the platform would begin to rise up to join its comrades rotating around the ceiling.

Hesitant, Samus triggered a scan as she braced for enemy missiles to come racing down from the Pirates that were sure to peak down any second. Little green icons appeared in her eyes, overlaid on the little floating platforms. At least whatever chaos Adam's half-awake mind was wrecking through the suit still at least allowed materials analysis. It couldn't tell her if she was damaging a priceless arcane treasure or a spellchecker, but in either case she leaped off the spindle arm and landed on one of the floating platforms, ripping off a panel and plunging her gauntlet hand into it's inner workings. She gripped and tore, and the dying platform staggered in the air as motes of light enveloped Samus' hand, dissolving and absorbing the key component.

The hail of text in her visor resolved itself into words. " _Your grapple beam has been restored. Well done._ "

Samus allowed herself a weary smile.

Ten pirates gathered on the rim of the walkway, looking down through the shifting web of spindle arms and circles of floating rectangles that filled the lower dome. Then, far across on the other side of the massive room, a line of crackling blue light like lighting briefly shone out through the forest of jointed arms. A few of the pirates exchanged confused looks and one shrugged. Then a new moment of crackling blue light blinked in and out before they lost sight of it again. The Pirates on the balcony raised their weapons as behind them the gunshots and explosions signaled that the defense against the metroids was still ongoing.

Far up above, Samus detached a new grapple beam from the spindle arm at the height of her forty-mile-an-hour swing. Then she plunged down onto the lead Pirate's back with the grace of a mortar shell. Her weapon swung up and shot the Pirate next to her in the face but the others in the line spun around to meet her. Samus threw out her left hand and the crackling blue beam lanced out to grip onto the chest armor of the middle soldier. He had time to look down and gape before Samus spun around and he was yanked off his feet, over the pit in a sweeping ellipse. Then his orbit returned and he threw his arms over his face as he bowled through comrades who had barely had time to each get off a single glancing shot on Samus.

She looked down with satisfaction as they tumbled down into the deep bowl with a crunch. Then she looked up with much less satisfaction at the forest of weapon barrels now pointed her way from the remaining bulk of the Pirate forces. Her left hand reached out in a wave and the grapple beam whipped out to catch a passing spindle arm, jerking her back as a thudding stream of missile launches from her weapon added their little extra speed. Jetpack Pirates took to the sky as a spray of blaster shots traced Samus' path, but up here she was an acrobat, swinging and flipping in a pattern that defied prediction.

She could probably harry them like this for any amount of time as their numbers were lessened by the metroids at their back. Floating weightless at an apex, Samus glanced down at the main door to see just how the Pirates were faring with those metroids. The bulk of the Pirate forces were still making their way along equatorial platform to one of the other exits deeper into the temple. That squad of heavily armored elites was still near the entrance and unfortunately seemed to be holding back the floating predators for now.

Then she saw the tall, feathered Chozo huddled in the center of their square formation.

Samus slammed her chest into the metal beam of a spindle arm, having completely forgotten that she was soaring through the air. They brought the Chozo here?! Those stupid damn idiots flung their most valuable prisoner into the middle of an ambush in unsecured territory?! Samus tumbled down sixty feet though void before reaching out to grab the joint of another mechanical arm. Her shield readout was starting to get low but she couldn't bring herself to think of that. The Chozo was here, right in front of her.

Right in front of the metroids.

She let out a curse that she'd only heard once when a drug dealing Byratian sex-monk accidentally closed an airlock door on his own arm. That same curse now still lasted on her tongue as she swung up to the top of the central spindle and planned her assault. The last two references to the ill-behaved mothers of certain gods rolled past as she raced forward to leap off in an arcing dive.

As she plummeted through the air, one of the metroids finally burst through the doorway from the entrance hall. It swooped up in the air through the soft orange light and then it screeched as it dove down at the only visible figure that wasn't wearing armor over its nourishing organic flesh. It dove at the Chozo.

"No!" Samus screamed out, her suit's amplification echoing even over the roar of the firefight. Too far away, the Chozo looked up.

Crackling hungry fangs plunged down from above, and only a bare hand reached up, long fingers splayed in useless repulsion. Samus landed on stone tiles with a crash and the scene was hidden behind the ranks of Pirates between them. There wasn't even a scream.

She charged forward, weapon burning as she fired again and again, bowling through the first Pirate ranks not by superior armament but by sheer aggression. Then she sprang up the front of a surprised heavy armor Pirate and caught hold of an unwisely low flying air-trooper, swinging up as she pressed the muzzle of her weapon deep into an unfortunately unarmored limb joint. For a brief moment she could see over to the Elite squad that was only now managing to meet the metroid threat among them. But there where she expected to see the hideous devouring of her living miracle, she instead saw a different miracle.

That metroid floated above the floor, shivering and bobbing in some flurry of emotion, but never leaving contact with the huge, long fingered hand that reached out to touch one vicious arcing fang. The Chozo stood tall, looking silently at the all-consuming monster that now showed no desire to consume. It was impossible. Then one of the pirates shot the metroid and it bolted to the side with an earsplitting screech as its fangs sunk deep into the chest of this new victim.

Samus pushed her way through the mass of enemies, brain still skipping and disoriented. She had to admit that by now the only reason she wasn't dead was that even Pirates were reluctant to unleash crossfire in the middle of a dense group of their comrades; at least without a direct order to do so. She estimated she had about three seconds before Ridley gave that order. The current barrage of fire was focused on the metroid among them, but as long as the creature was consuming its current victim it seemed to be healing at the same rate it was taking damage. As distractions went, Samus had to give a hungry metroid in an infantry platoon rather high marks. The battle shifted again and she caught sight of several Elites trying to rushing the Chozo off away from the heart of the fighting. Samus cut across towards them.

A sharp hit impacted her shoulder and sent her spinning. A metroid's dying scream rose over the roar of combat and explosions as her ears rang. Samus hit the ground, armor scraping across stone, then her booster jets surged and she slid through her attacker's legs. A grapple beam, a flip, a very surprised shout, then two quick shots and she managed to reach the Elite squad now at the forefront of the fleeing pirate force. However, that was the point when Ridley's voice crackled over the com channels and Samus glanced back at forty armed Pirates who now had orders to attack her without concern for friendly fire.

Fortunately, there seemed to still be a moment of hesitance, even with orders from the supreme commander, so Samus grabbed the only chance she was likely to get. She sprang up, jets surged in air, and her grapple beam caught hold of the very tip of a swiftly passing spindle arm. The resulting arc yanked her between the hulking armored Elite's firing lines, straight to and past the captive Chozo's position. It was just a pity that "to and past" in this case also included "through", so Samus' first introduction to the man she was saving included quite a bit more impact than she would have otherwise preferred.

The Chozo crumpled against her weapon arm, winded and stunned for a brief second before Samus suddenly had to deal with holding an uncooperative long limbed passenger over two feet taller than her. By then they soared out over the vast empty sphere of the center of the room, narrowly avoiding other randomly flexing spindle arms. Behind them, the pirate coms were exploding with clashing shouts and orders so the pursuing fire was disorganized. Fierce rotational acceleration strained her arm, but Samus detached her grapple beam and enjoyed an abruptly linear path across the room to the equatorial balcony on the far side of the huge sphere. Then she spun for her landing, stuck it, and heard a series of pained shouts which reminded her that her taller passenger had just had his legs and arms slammed into the floor.

Samus released the Chozo as gently as she could, allowing him to gain his own feet out of mercy as well the need to have her weapon free to start shooting. Well, perhaps mostly for the shooting. She raised her gun arm and fired repeatedly, suit systems tracing for the rare open paths through that complex shifting web of arms and platforms rotating around the central spindle. Out of the corner of her eye she watched the Chozo begin to slowly rise beside her.

He was tall, and dressed in dark red-brown robes that looked much like what Old Bird and Grey Voice had once worn, except this new example was decorated with intricate thin patterns of golden thread. The hairlike feathers on his head showed a hint of gold as well, a faint metallic sheen like flecks of pyrite adding to the deep brown color. His eyes and beak were strong and dark. He looked young, though Samus realized that her perceptions were skewed. Old Bird and Grey Voice had endured centuries of hard living prior to finding Samus, on top of their untold lives before. This Chozo was not wearied and beaten down like them; he was alive.

As Samus held her breath as she watched from the edge of her perception, he stared down at her with all of his. The Chozo loomed over Samus even as he stepped back away from her, his forward-slung head swaying slightly as he surveyed her with disbelief in his wide yellow eyes. Then his beak cracked open with a gasp of breath.

"That armor." The voice was was deep and at the same time almost a whisper.

A shiver passed down Samus' spine and somehow the suit itself seemed to echo that rippling sensation. It had been so many years since she'd heard that language from a living mouth. But she could not allow herself to feel that homecoming rapture, she had a task to complete. The Pirates were advancing at a full run, they would round even this huge room soon enough. Samus had no confidence in her ability to fight that many and live; to fight while protecting another was flat out impossible. Still shooting, she called up suit telemetry and noticed that there was a new door a little distance behind her, leading to some other chamber deeper in the temple. She also noticed that on that map this grand sphere of a room now had now acquired a label and a name.

" _The Library of the Winnowers_ "

She wondered when the suit had added that.

The Chozo slowly stretched out his long arm toward her, fingers splayed as if reaching to grasp. "I thought I was the last. I thought everything was gone," he gasped with wonder and relief. But then something dark passed through that revery and his hand drew back. A recognition of scale clicked and his eyes narrowed. Tall as she was among humans, Samus only reached up to the chest of an adult Chozo. She was far too small to be wearing that armor.

His hands curled at his side as he looked down at her. "What are you?"

"A warrior," Samus replied in her own voice carried on the suit's speakers. The Chozo stepped back confusion mounted at the sound of his native language fluently spoken through an alien mouth. "And now is the time that I rescue you."

The Chozo's expression did not have any less suspicion. He angled slightly towards the approaching pirate horde. "Where do you believe you will rescue me _to_?"

That was a good question. Samus had been playing this by ear since she discovered the boy Roger's transmission had somehow been faked. That kind of improvisation wasn't going to be enough now. She looked at the suit's sparse map of the temple and cursed inwardly. Aurora had been so stingy with data outside the planned operational area, always following the same Federation pattern of compartmentalization and need-to-know military. Samus had seen far too many people die for that kind of need and now she had to make sure there weren't two more.

Aurora was still there but Samus couldn't ask now; Ridley could hear any transmission. So instead Samus looked around, trying to glean some information from the heavy doors behind her to see if it was a valid path to safety. Just as the scan suggested, the way was shut. Above the heavy metal gate a few word were inscribed deep in the interlocked sheets.

" _Chains of Death and Life_ "

Sometimes she really hated the Chozo naming conventions. She'd once found a ruined washroom called " _Dust's Oblivion_ ". This door here could lead to a jail, a mausoleum, or a cafeteria for all she knew. Then blue text blinked across her helmet visor once again. Adam's digital mind was flailing as it regrew, an arrow was pointing forward, another was pointing back, and amid it all it flashed, " _You are in danger. You must continue. You are in danger. You must continue_."

Samus tried to think, shaking this useless babbling out of her eyes. Interaction with the Library seemed to have worsened whatever had already been happening in the suit's processors. But Adam was still trying to communicate something.

During this the Chozo had noticed her looking off in that direction. He turned back and saw that same door. Samus heard a sharp intake of breath and a word too soft to be understood. Then he began to walk forward towards that door, slowly, as if half asleep. Samus was about to yell after him to stop until she realized that she didn't exactly have any better ideas. The chamber of _Death and Life_ was currently as good a chance as any of the other options. The Pirates would be here in thirty seconds.

She spun and sprang into a dash towards the door, fiery energy building in her gun as she prepared to fire at its weakest point. However, even as she sprinted past the Chozo in a wind-swept rush, he raised up one long-fingered hand and the heavy metal door began to slide apart of its own accord. The sickle shaped sheets of thick metal separated like unfolding feathers and revealed a dark hall within.

Samus slid to a rapid stop with a shrug. Then she darted back, bodily scooping up the protesting Chozo before bolting to sprint into the new chamber even as the charging Pirates rounded the last corner. A volley of hostile missiles screamed into the air behind them but luckily even under his outrage the Chozo had the sense to quickly command the door to slam shut as soon as Samus and he slipped through. Metal clanged and Samus came to a halt in a dark hall of branching corridors. In fact the Chozo seemed personally offended by their enemies choosing to shoot at all and he was grumbling surprisingly personal invectives against them as Samus lowered him to his feet once more.

However, once he was under his own power he seemed to forget Samus and the Pirates entirely. He stepped forward and walked through the dark branching halls as if in a dream. The barely visible green glow washed away his visible health. A long feathered arm reached out to gently run a finger across a stone ledge, thick with long years of dust.

His voice whispered out into the dark. "This place. Emptiness. Silence. So, they are truly gone, even from here. The lower forms were right, I truly am the last. I am the last."

Samus followed along behind, keeping a steady eye on the suit scan's monitoring of the door. Those Pirates would probably be able to get through that soon enough. The last Chozo had been forced to give them a lot of computing tricks during his captivity. Something in that small mountain of equipment they'd brought into the temple would undoubtably serve them for a key, given enough time.

But now The Last appeared to be searching this new labyrinth for something without really knowing if it was here at all. He walked past branching corridors and small open chambers with only a quick glance at the contents of each. Samus opened her mouth but in that moment the Last spoke instead.

"How did you acquire that armor?"

Now was not the time for that discussion, even if Samus had been sure of the answer. By now her armor was the ship of an interstellar Theseus, having been destroyed and rebuilt so many times any one answer on its origin seemed incorrect. Once they got to the time for those kinds of difficult questions Samus had her own volumes to offer. But before she could ask things like, " _Where did they find you? How are you alive?_ " and " _Where is everyone else?_ " she had to make sure that they themselves would remain alive.

Still, some instincts of obedience were drilled very deeply into her. Samus said, "I was trained in the ways of power and knowledge since I was a hatchling in my first mind. My teachers departed with all the other living Chozo I was aware of in the galaxy, leaving a battle suit in my charge."

The Last exhaled sharply. He continued walking through the dark, never looking back. "Trained in knowledge." That tone sounded disbelieving. "A warrior." _That_ tone was was unmistakably so.

This sensation within Samus' head was a strange kind of vertigo. With each breath and word of his presence, this Chozo seemed to erase decades of Samus' life. She blinked and for half a second she was very young and walking behind Grey Voice through the quiet halls of Zebes. In that moment she once again needed to prove herself to those she loved.

Her whisper now sounded weak and small. "Energy is matter, matter is life, life is thought, and thought is energy. Past and future are the same present. All devisions are an illusion."

Halfway through her speech the Last stopped in his tracks, frozen. Then he turned back, his features barely visible in the dark. "What was that?" His voice was breathy and shaken.

"Knowledge. The heart of the Chozo."

Samus was not sure what reaction she expected, but it certainly wasn't laughter. The Last tilted back his head and laughed long and hard, each peal echoing off the narrow stone walls to clash together in a harsh cacophony.

Humor and something darker clashed in his voice. "The fools. Hypocrites. And yet they are wise in the end." He took a few more strides forward and then stopped once more. "The path forward is rutted too deep for any of them to fight. And it is _my_ path."

He turned at another square chamber like many they had already passed but here the Last saw something different. Technology of an unknown purpose stood along each wall and conduits led to a sort of podium in the center. Samus' eyebrows lowered and she tapped her temple to initiate a scan as the Last walked forward into the center of the room. Somewhere behind them the sound of metal scraping metal signaled that the Pirates had secured some override to the locked door.

Blue text appeared in Samus' eyes, interrupting the scan readout. " _Please, run._ "

Samus agreed with Adam. It was time to go. "Unless this equipment has the secure path to stop the advancing enemies, we must leave at once or suffer recapture."

For all his previous curiosity, the Last now seemed barely to recognize Samus' existence. He stroked a finger over the central pedestal's dark bronze metal. The dim light changed slightly as something in the room powered up. "I saw the creatures outside, those floating predators. They were created; creating using that _heart_. Something beautiful, going into the manufacturing of something so crude."

"They are named metroid."

Now he actually looked up and met Samus' eyes. "By their designer?" Suddenly he looked to the left and right, shivering with suspicion. The thud of pirate feet searching the maze-like corridors was approaching but that didn't appear to be what the Last feared. "This place. They laid a new prophecy. Yes, I can feel it. Someone has tried to change what will be."

That weightless feeling washed back through Samus. The strange undercurrent of this planet, the press of subtle influence all around her, he sensed it too. "We were both brought here to intersect."

The Last's attention returned to the pedestal. He was only half paying attention as he addressed Samus. "No. Not both." He pressed some new control as he murmured, "Things such as you are not actors in this calculation. You are just one more piece of detritus caught in our wake. First you attacked the Urtragians' command ship, thus providing the link of motivation between the humans and myself. And now here you deliver me to this precise location, completing my entry into the ascension path. Your part is done, little thing, and what is to come may now discard you."

Samus took half a step back, her boot sliding on the dusty stone. Her weapon arm twitched up, she'd heard enough vaguely ominous speeches to recognize them from the first few words. But she couldn't aim at him, even as her pulse elevated, sensing violence soon to come. No, she couldn't. The Last was still disoriented even in the midst of this new confidence. Everything he said indicated an uncertainty of what had happened in the galaxy for the last century or so. He'd evidently experienced some period of isolation off wherever the Pirates found him.

She just had to reorient him before this turned worse. "Hostiles will reach this room soon."

"Hostiles? Oh yes, that." He carelessly reached up and brushed a metal ornament clinging to his robe. Samus' suit instantly picked up a short range transmitter signature. The Last said, "Followers, eliminate all those loyal to Commander Ridley."

Samus' gun leaped to attention even as blaster shots and screams rang out through the warren of narrow corridors. The Pirates obeyed him. The Last frowned down at the her weapon muzzle pointed straight at his face, as fifty yards away Pirate soldiers were executing each other. Samus did not twitch or tremble as she kept his aim steady on his forehead. The power beam's burning energy began to reflect in the Last's eyes as glowing pinpricks.

He said, "Your existence disturbs me, little thing. You will tell me where your creators hailed from." He then interrupted himself. "No, it does not matter. The Urtragians have plenty of data on you in their computer banks. I will examine it in a moment."

A brief moment of silence was punctuated by a few more pairs of nearby blaster shots from the halls outside. The issue of pirate leadership here had apparently now sorted itself out. Suit scan said that the survivors were regrouping and slowly advancing. Samus stood there, frozen even as her finger felt the weapon trigger. "You weren't their prisoner."

The Last looked back down, continuing to manipulate the controls on the pedestal in front of her without any more concern for the weapon aimed at his head. His tone was calm, and almost conversational. "No. Not to them. But at first they thought I was. In fact their over-enhanced commander persisted in that belief until, oh, about nine second ago."

Samus tried to breath, her soul still swaying the the feeling of hanging out over a great gulf. The plummet from miracle to adversary was horrifying. She remembered the large metal box in the Pirate ship. It had been empty, empty as a cell when the prisoner had escaped. Inside the power beam, her finger twitched. No, she couldn't kill him. She still didn't know enough.

Text blinked in her eyes, " _Please_ "

The Last was still Ridley's enemy. He was just trying to get back to what might have once been his home. Whoever he was he could still be convinced. He didn't know her yet.

"I do know you." The Last's voice rang out even in a murmur, rebounding off the stone and metal walls. He sounded like he was delivering a lecture on some boring subject. "You are not complicated enough to hold much mystery. It is written on you. Human, a rising omnivorous species. Acquired by some outcast sect of my people, likely no more than a few individuals. You were evidently young enough to still be in an imprinting phase, which explains why you do not harm me. Then when my people left to complete the project, they handed you an adapted battle suit and set you lose on the galaxy alone, presumably as some way to assuage their nagging guilt at the memory of the days when we governed these stars. One last bandage thrown at the dying slum they were leaving behind."

More lights came on, illuminating the room in greens and blues. He clicked his tongue in satisfaction. "And you were strong. Of course you were. Having even one percent the nature of my people, you would tower over these caterpillars which surround you. But you still could not touch the path and so you have been left flailing, caught in the web of time that you could only barely perceive. Trying and failing to be one of my people. You felt the missing space in the prophecy between stars and so you strived with all your might to fill it."

Samus realized that she needed to act but she still only stood there frozen, caught between sinking horror and desperate, dying hope.

The Last stepped over and touched yet another panel, saying, "But the path you felt was never yours." He wasn't even talking to her now, just addressing the idea of her. Samus' weapon was still trained on him. Whatever he was doing on that pedestal, she needed to shoot now. She needed to kill him.

She needed to.

The Last stretched his long arms at his side. His feathers glimmered in the building power and his beak shone with the reflected light. Footsteps thudded behind Samus and a group of Pirates ran up to fill the chamber doorway but they froze when they saw the Last raise his hand. The Chozo chuckled. "There is always a strange humor to see the prophecy in motion. Those floating creatures outside, this stolen mangled armor, they appear to me like a presentation of evidence; showing how my hypocritical people perverted my work. After sentencing me to punishment, they wielded the very accomplishment that they named as my crime. And then this scavenger species has the nerve to call them angels."

He looked back and once more his eyes met Samus'. The light in the room grew brighter, building to a blinding white. She'd missed her chance, and she knew it. Inside the weapon, her right hand shook.

The Last stared down at her, helpless despite all her armament. "Be at peace in this moment, little thing. This has always been beyond your control. After all, I am the one who wrote your _heart._ "

Then he touched the pedestal as Samus' finger pulled on the firing trigger. The world vanished in light and pain as a wave of energy passed through her.

She recognized that pain, searing past metal and shields to strike at flesh.

It felt like the touch of a metroid.

...


	12. Mother's Embrace

...

White light permeated the world and it was the color of agony.

Samus staggered through stone and metal hallways. She could barely see. The suit was the only thing keeping her upright and it was only just functioning. All the biological components had been hit as hard as Samus' own cells. To a force like that light, shields and armor were nothing, just another illusion around the inner truth. The Last Chozo had unleashed an unrestrained reaper system, harvesting raw life energy from anything within its radius with a field that stabbed straight at the heart of her physical existence. It hurt.

The Pirates who served The Last had collapsed at the first brush of the light, screaming in terrified ecstasy. They were probably dead, Samus couldn't remember, she'd lost some short term memory as a blood vessel ruptured inside her brain for a bit before the nanobots could triage it. As she stumbled through the dark halls her thoughts were wavering but she could still remember The Last standing in the eye of that searing storm, looking down at all his buckling sacrifices like a sad and disinterested god. But Samus had failed to fall and then his eyes grew wide. Sound echoed before action and she fired her weapon again and again. He ducked, or withstood it, or she simply missed; she couldn't tell. Hallucinations or blood filled her eyes. So she fled, stumbling out of the chamber, over Pirate bodies that were dissolving down to fine grey dust between her feet.

The Last hadn't followed her. Evidently he'd expected the life-drain system to kill her instantly, and once it didn't he had no desire to face a dying woman in an armed battlesuit. That thought drifted back through her mind; she was probably dying. If she wasn't, she was certainly very close since she could only remember a time or two she'd felt worse than this. But why wasn't she dead already? Why had she been less affected by the field? Her feet were unsteady and her head swam in swirly visions of dark hallways. Was she already dead?

Was this just another memory?

Her ankle buckled and she fell sideways, catching her hand against the dusty wall. Then that slipped too and her shoulder's pauldron clanged on the stone instead. The metal scraped as her knees tried to lift her back up. The suit's readouts were blurry in front of her eyes, but she thought it was telling her that there were still living Pirates in the area who hadn't caught in the reaper field. Those Pirates had obeyed the Chozo, betraying Ridley. Were they coming after her? Well, whatever the case, they would just have to see to their own affairs. If they wanted to shoot Samus in the head right now she was in no shape to argue.

Had they already pulled the trigger? No, not them. She had, right?

Samus' hand grasped her face, but touched only smooth metal.

No footsteps followed her but her own, and Samus managed to stagger through the door to the Library of the Winnowers. In the soft yellow gloom she saw a few pieces of Pirate tech lying scattered on the ground outside, likely what they'd used to crack to the door's security. In her current state, Samus was almost impressed with the lucidity of that thought. There were also two Space Pirate soldiers standing in the corner who looked very surprised to see Samus stumble out next to them.

One of them held a little foil packet in his claw's tentacles, a snack of some sort during a boring rear-guard activity. For a moment all three of them froze in place. Then one of the Pirates abruptly slumped over as if he was trying to play dead. Samus decided that she didn't have time for these two to make up their minds if they wanted to kill her so she just kept walking, pain slowly blurring into distance. They did not follow.

Time faded and then she was outside of the temple, walking along the narrow canyon floor in the dark night. How had she gotten here? Belatedly she realized where she was walking to, Aurora's shielded complex stood near the point where this canyon fork opened up into the wider colony valley. She had to tell them, tell someone what had happened. They were up there too, in the black with the stars.

Blurry blue letters floated in her visor, " _You are in great pain. But you are strong._ "

She couldn't focus on that; her thoughts were wandering. That unnamed Chozo said he had written the _Heart of the Chozo_ , that fundamental equation of life and power. He'd said the life drain technology was his. No that was impossible, the Heart was ancient. But the Chozo were immortal. But they still aged and The Last looked hale. He'd been imprisoned. The Chozo didn't imprison people. But they might have once, long ago when their selves were different. They might have considered a stasis capsule hidden at the edge of space to be a gentle punishment. A kindness.

But they had left and forgotten their prisoner. Or they'd intended him to get out, now that the others had abandoned a galaxy they no longer cared about. All the cells were thrown open. Or it was just another meaningless tragedy.

Samus slipped and her foot kicked a loose rock to go skittering down the sloping access road that traced the narrow canyon floor. No hunting metroids descended from the night, not that she could even bring herself to even look up. All her will was focused on continuing to walk, even as the suit did nearly all of the work. For a moment she couldn't remember where she was going, then she caught sight of the electric lights in the distant head of the narrow canyon. The Research Compound; that was where Aurora 926 was stationed. The AI had held off the entire Pirate assault crew in her heavily shielded fortress, last refuge for the five thousand human charges she'd managed to get inside before the attack hit. Samus had to get there. She had to tell someone. Nakamura had to know about the Last.

She had to...

Then her helmet clonked on a wall and Samus stepped back, disoriented. Time had skipped again somewhere along the way. She was at the Research Compound and there was a locked and shielded door right in front of her.

"Aurora, open the door," she said. Or at least she intended to say that. She wasn't sure what the sounds actually came out as, since her breathing felt uncomfortably wet. It was probably blood in her lungs. That wasn't good. Open broadcasts giving away her position were hardly the biggest concern right now.

A voice spoke in her ear, "Right away, Ms Aran."

The energy field popped and the door slid apart. Samus stumbled forward as she realized she's propped her weapon arm against that same door, somehow forgetting it was there in the second between question and answer. She was not in good shape. But she had to keep moving, she had to get to...Where was she going? Where could help her? These hallways were dark.

Oh, Aurora was talking.

"...suit is limiting my scans for injuries. Commander Nakamura will be upset about you disregarding his order, but fortunately the repairs to the Diomedes are almost complete. The Commander is confidant Diomedes will recover orbital supremacy shortly. In the mean time you must-"

"Chozo," Samus said, pushing the words out as bubbles of blood popped in her mouth. Things were getting worse not better. That meant her nanite colonies had failed in their repair job. She was light headed. At least the suit's painkiller manufactory was unaffected. Or that was just the shock. Or the brain damage.

She mumbled, "...The Chozo survived. The Pirates were getting through that door anyway. They found him, out in...He's there, he's...they're worshiping him. Two factions. Ridley and the Last. He invented the heart... _Energy is matter, matter is life, life is_ -"

She stumbled and reached out for the edge of a nearby desk. The desk, unfortunately, was not rated for powered armor and then she was looking up from the floor amid broken plastic shards. At least now she didn't need to focus on walking and talking at the same time.

Samus breathed in and out, staring at the ceiling. "Report to Nakamura: Pirate resource is a living Chozo individual, possibly recovered from long term stasis. Individual has seized control of a faction of the hostile landing party. Has gained entrance to temple grounds and is gathering equipment. Unknown goal." A cough triggered spasms. For some reason the pain made her smile. "You were right, human transmission was a trap. I sprung it. Report end: queue for delivery."

Aurora's invisible voice was soft and filled with concern. "Ms Aran, I believe you are in need of urgent medical care. Unfortunately I do not posses any drones who can reach your position current. I am afraid you must relocate yourself to the nearest care facility."

That sounded difficult. Samus was tired. She whispered into the comfort of her helmet. "No cure. Chozo life energy absorption field, without limiters. I was ten feet away. Total organic system failure soon." She was still lying amid the plastic shards of the cheap desk. She decided to keep lying there. "Aurora, I'll give you a full black box data download from my suit. Should help Nakamura's team. Might save-"

"Ms Aran, I've completed ten thousand simulations and I believe I may have an experimental treatment for your condition!" An AI mind had a characteristically precise way of speaking when it was trying to convey time sensitive information to poor meatspace creatures that existed on timeframes longer than picoseconds. It was a conversational experience rather like being politely trampled. "The required equipment is downstairs, but you must hurry. My scans cannot penetrate your armor so I have no idea how severe the damage is."

"Shut up."

"Ms Ar-?"

"No. Sorry. The other thing." Samus grunted as she slowly rose to unsteady feet. Her thoughts were muddled and she could not longer feel her extremities. Random and pervasive pain signals made up most of her feedback now, and she was relying of the suit's neural link more than her own flesh. Which didn't make sense, a lot of her nerve fibers were no longer cellular but maybe the organic crystalline stuff had still suffered from the field or...

She was standing in that same hall, not moving. She hoped it hadn't been for too long, but she couldn't clearly read the numbers on her visor overlay anymore. Luckily Aurora seemed to understand and was pushing over her virtual instructions as a series of large floating arrows. That was about the limit of Samus' problem solving skills at the moment. She eventually stumbled into an elevator lit only by soft white under-lighting. The elevator was nice and dim, like the hallways.

Aurora was talking again as the floor slowly fell away, carrying Samus with it. "...the discovery of those early development reaper systems in the temple of course spearheaded this branch of the research. Luckily, your existing augmentations make this procedure uniquely possible to succeed."

"Lucky. Possible." The pain of speaking was worth underlining that bit of overstatement. There was no luck, only the future interacting with the present. Her parents had always said that. Which ones had said that?

"Do not worry, Ms Aran. I have calculated excellent odds of survival. We will keep you safe. You are important to all of us."

The elevator door opened to another dimly lit corridor, much larger this time. She was deep in the bowels of Aurora's bastion. Somewhere here Aurora's true body was hidden, along with the five thousand colonists. Samus mumbled, "You keep them safe." This time the pain surprised her. She'd already forgotten that speaking hurt. She was failing fast. Or she thought she was. She couldn't remember. At least some people were safe.

Something moved nearby and Samus raised her weapon. However, that movement took her off balance and she began to fall, vision swirling into incomprehension. Then metal arms caught her and lifted her up. To her dissolving mind, staring at that high ceiling of pipes and vents sliding by above her was like flying. There was sound, wheels on flooring and the sliding of solenoids echoing in the silent halls. It was some sort of robot, a drone Aurora had sent to collect her. That was nice. It carried her like a child and she could feel it on her metal skin.

Then the lights were bright and all around her. White light had returned but it didn't hurt this time. No, this was a different place. This was a new room, sterile white with human machinery all around her. Something held her in place, levitating the suit up into the middle of this space. Things like glowing eyes were focused on her as metal arms moved closer. Samus spun and staggered in her own head. Her senses were confused, somehow she heard the taste of food. She smelled beasts in the forest. She felt hunger blush her skin with its fingertips.

A voice said something.

Then she heard a crackling screech and she blacked out.

...

Samus awoke.

She blinked and saw the white wall in front of her, neat blue stenciling tracing out this laboratory designation in the adaptive technology wing of the Research compound. She was standing upright in the middle of this white room, panels to each side of her slowly closing as the instruments inside folded away. Nothing was supporting her but her own limbs and suit.

A little bit of text floated in her visor, Adam warmly welcoming her back to the land of the living. " _Your body has been fully healed. Well done, lady_."

After what she'd just been through that sounded like it was more delusional gibberish. But the heads-up displays cheerfully reported that the suit was now at full operative capacity, and in fact was a fully charged state that matched Samus' own perfect physical health. Samus breathed in and out, and felt no pain or numbness, only the normal sensation of her lungs within her ribcage. She looked down at her gauntleted hand, flexing smoothly in perfect unison of flesh and mechanics. She was healed.

That was completely impossible.

"Ah, Ms Aran, it seems you've regained full consciousness." It was Aurora. Inside the compound, the biocomputer could easily establish any transmission link. "That is excellent! I was worried for a bit, as you know my scans can't penetrate your suit so I was afraid there was a chance the procedure had failed."

The suit readouts confirmed it. All power cores were recharged but the onboard medical systems now found themselves without anything to do. The damage Samus had sustained, whatever it had been, was gone now. Her body had regenerated, and if the clock was to be trusted, no time had passed.

Correction, thirty-eight seconds had passed since she lost consciousness. Thirty-eight seconds to do work that the best medical facility in the galaxy would struggle to do in five weeks.

Samus clenched her gauntlet into a fist. "The procedure. What is it?"

"Of course, Ms Aran. Research Station J-4M has, among other things, made great strides in analyzing the precursors of Chozo life energy manipulation technology. Many systems have been reverse engineered, including this technique of, quite simply, reversing it."

So, that was it. Aurora had inverted the attack the Last had landed on Samus, bathing her and the suit with pure life energy. The federation had been here pawing through the temple for years so it figured that they had figured some things out. However, Samus still frowned. That energy flood technique would have been reasonable for the suit, the reaper systems could easily recharge power from such a transmission, but living creatures didn't work like that. Shoving that much pure energy at a live cell should have been like throwing a photosynthesizing plant into the sun; drowning useless plenty. But for some reason instead of burning off her bones, she was mysteriously alive. Again.

Evidently Aurora deduced her objections because she spoke up. "Of course this laboratory was not designed with any medical use in mind, merely experimentation. Your precise procedure has never been attempted on any human before precisely because you are currently the only known individual to whom it would not be immediately fatal. The aftereffect of the metroid infusion therapy are the only thing that made this possible, but luckily it worked."

Samus breathed in. The metroid. That made sense. Their entire artificial biology relied on quickly absorbing that kind of energy. So, she owned her life to that hatchling once again, dead for years but still touching wavering thread her life. The edge of Samus' mouth twitched in a sad smile. Her second parents were right, existence continued long past the bounds of life.

But then she looked up, eyes locking on the concealed camera mounted in the corner of the room. She felt a thread of ice begin to work though her tensing muscles. On her way into the facility her mind had been jumbled, weak and unobservant. But the memories were still there and now she was awake enough to analyze them. To notice what she should have noticed before.

It felt like Aurora was lying.

Samus turned to look outside the laboratory. This lower floor was more open than the office-like floor plan upstairs, having felt safe to sprawl out underground. But it was still dark; dark and quiet.

"Where are the people you have sheltered here?" There were five thousand colonists in this building, but instead of noise and crowds the lights were dim and the halls were empty.

The bio-computer's voice was as smooth and conversational as always. "Deeper within. This facility is much larger than you have seen. In accordance with Commander Nakamura's orders I have dedicated my full efforts to protecting my remaining charges. I will keep them safe and whole, which in part includes separating them from areas easily accessed from the outside."

That was a reasonable explanation. If fact, common sense said that it was obvious and that any other thoughts were the shaky memories of a brain damaged radiation victim. Still, Samus felt the tug of prediction, that suggestion of intention and motion in the universe behind the curtain of time. Or she was chasing deluded memories. The Last had said she was incapable of truly seeing the prophecies of the Chozo. True, he'd tried to kill her but Samus had gone through the same thoughts many times over the decades and-

No. These suspicions were ridiculous. She was letting personal feeling cloud her thoughts. Bio-computers thought in ways that mapped so closely to evolved creatures that modeling their behavior sometimes tripped the wrong reflexes. It was easy to misinterpret their intentions if your emotions were out of balance. Samus had learned that lesson long ago. Now she was letting experience with Mother Brian cloud her reasoning.

Samus stepped out of the life-energy lab, footsteps echoing though a long, wide hall populated by tanks, pipes, and assorted wheeled drone robots. She looked left and right. Her memories were hazy and she couldn't remember which way she had entered from. "Time to next Diomedes contact?"

"Two minutes. Commander Nakamura will be so glad to hear from you."

Samus took another step and marveled at the lack of pain. And it was not just a lack of pain, she felt better than she had in years. She looked down at her flexing hand again. Her muscles surged in rapid response to the slightest intention, over-clocked in a manner similar to adrenaline but with none of the vibrating twitchiness. She was steady; racing along at peak performance. Aurora's treatment had certainly worked.

It had worked _very_ well. Samus glanced around again, tapping her helmet's temple as she cycled through scan modes as she examined her surroundings. Aurora had made clear that this procedure had no chance of success on any human but as Samus checked the suit's records she saw that the energy had all been delivered at almost a constant frequency. There had been no modulated escalation from zero, trying to tune in on the analogue application of a new theory. No, Aurora had started nearly exactly on target. That indicated previous tests, previous calibration. And if no humans had been subjected to this machine then-

"Diomedes to Aurora 926." Nakamura's voice suddenly filled Samus' ears. Aurora had evidently opened up the encrypted call to anyone within this building, letting the suit easily grab hold. "Ship repair status is blue. What is your ground report?"

Aurora chimed back. "No damage sustained. Asset Zeta recovered and repaired on Crashdome site. Data stream is now uploaded to your computers."

Well, at least the federation had figured out that the Chozo had given the Pirates full decrypting capabilities, even if they didn't yet know who was responsible. The Federation was competent enough to have backup arbitrary cyphers pre arranged for key information. Of coarse it didn't take much to guess that Samus herself was Zeta, though she could only hope what "blue" status meant.

Nakamura's sharp inhalation was cut from the transmission but the sign was still there when he spoke again. "Zeta?" The transmission went quiet for another second before returning. "That's good. Good. Zeta deployment is desired under the timetable. Counterattack will be conducted jointly."

Samus waved in the air, signaling to Aurora, "Connect me."

Instantly little icon appeared on her visor, showing her new access to the facility's transmission power. Trying to talk in code was commendable, but there were some things that she wanted the enemy to hear. She was sick of people thinking she was dead.

Samus began her own version of the report to Nakamura, "The Pirates have a living Chozo collaborator. However, he just went rogue in the temple and has claimed control over an unknown percentage of the Pirate forces. The Chozo's motivations are unclear but Ridley may not be the biggest threat anymore. He is collecting life drain technology and has some measure of control over the deployed metroids."

Silence followed this. Samus could almost imagine hearing the distant sound of Ridley smashing his code-breaking equipment in fury. The corner of her mouth twitched in a smirk. Quickly exposing The Last's double cross weakened both him and Ridley, so there was no reason to play coy here, no matter what their true plans. That calculation was obvious, so the question on Nakamura's mind should be why did Aurora fail to mention that.

"Er," a confused female voice crept onto the line. "Samus Aran? I think there may have been another mistake in the communications channels."

Samus felt the need to slam her head into a wall. That joke she'd left in Diomedes' programing was now starting to look like a very stupid idea. Well, she was certainly fulfilling the reporting requirement of her parol.

She sighed, "Hello, Officer Yin."

"Ms Aran, was...was all that really true?" The young Federation operative sounded worried and stressed. But there was determination under that weariness. "Only I've been found some things here in the documentation that-"

"Aran, I hope you're happy with yourself." Nakamura broke back in, sending Yin's coms back to whatever she'd been doing before. "Your little prank seems to have infected up to thirty percent of our systems by now. It's setting repair times back as they scrub the banks one by one." That probably wasn't true, just more disinformation for the listening ears, but Samus still winced. She deserved that at least.

But right now she had greater concerns than her self chastisement.

At least Nakamura seemed to recognize that too because he continued, "Right, so evidently the Pirate command is already aware that one of their own assets has gone rogue. Well, an enemy divided. Hmm, if it went straight for the life energy tech then I can guess what its next goal is."

Samus broke into Nakamura's authoritative muttering. "The colony. There needs to be an evacuation contingency. The danger has grown."

"What? Damn it, Aran, we can't let that be our focus." He was afraid. "You don't have any idea what's in that Temple. The consequences of letting either hostile alien force get access to that are beyond questioning. It wouldn't just be this planet at danger, but the entire federation! All that's immaterial any way, since any plan we came up with to evacuate whatever surviving colonists there may be would expose the Diomedes to unacceptable danger. Everyone would die."

Samus' breath caught. There it was, the unconscious wording, the blade of the knife, the idea she had been sensing. Her voice was flat and without affect, "Whatever colonists there may be."

"You know what I mean. Aran, you're more knowledgeable on Chozo psychology than anyone we have. You need to get back out there and stop the Pirate's rogue asset. I'm increasing your security clearance a level. Aurora, give her a batch of files on the Temple."

"Of course, Commander."

The digital information began to blink in the corner of Samus' vision but she was not paying attention to it. The Chozo had taught her that the identity of self was more important than most beings imagined. It created it's own private reality with it's own laws as constant as gravity. But if you watched, and listened closely, you could feel that universe brushing your own and so understand the self that created it.

In Nakamura's reality the colonists were all already dead.

Samus felt the world waver in it's orientation as the web of probability shifted. Nakamura was still talking to Aurora and her but Samus was no longer fully listening, even as the Commander's signal began to fade away behind the planet's horizon. She walked away down the hallway, into the dark. She could hear it now in Aurora's actions too, the computer did not behave like it was protecting the last of it's precious charges.

Nakamura's voice sprang back one last time, crackling with static. "Aran, what are you doing?"

Samus kept walking, descending into the facility as Aurora's eternally calm voice belied an increasing level of anxiety. Samus did not reply. However increasing lockdown only served to lead Samus by the path of least resistance. Then she met a thick security door.

"I am sorry, Ms Aran, your clearance still does not give you access to this area."

Samus tapped her temple and the heavy metal door slid open, digital walls crumpling to Chozo tech.

The next door was a lot larger and heavily shielded, scan could get nothing from behind it.

Aurora's voice returned, echoing faintly on the armored walls deep underground. "I am very sorry, but I have standing orders heavily restricting outside personnel from entering this part of the compound."

A few super missile explosions settled the matter of clearance rather definitively. Samus climbed through the hole, gauntlet pressing briefly on on the twisted edges of superheated metal. Inside she exited out into a high walkway above large circular room. In the very center sat the huge vertical tank filled with liquid and housing the pulsing dark mass of Aurora's true body. The biocomputer's heart-like shape was the only visible organism but as Samus stepped into the room, her suit scan suddenly lit up with life signatures from every direction, in chambers branching off from the main sanctum. There were five thousand of them.

Breath hissed past Samus' teeth. The colonists, they were actually here. She froze mid step, shaken and unsure how to proceed. Had she actually gotten it this wrong? Every suggestion and hint had indicated that the Federation was lying. But the suit said-

"Ms Aran, I strenuously object to your forced entry. You have compromised the physical security of my housing and the safety of my charges. In compliance with the terms of your sentencing I must issue a Federation order for you to vacate this part of the facility."

Samus slowly walked around the gantry. Soon she got a better look through the dark at all those secondary chambers sprouting the central room's cylindrical walls. The energy fields that walled them off disrupted precise scan, but they did nothing to hide the thermal signatures within. Samus could see the shapes moving around inside.

In that moment one of those shapes reached forward to touch blindly touch the transparent wall. It cautiously probed the field with a long fang as it's bulbous body levitated several feet off the floor. They were metroids. Five thousand juvenile metroids. That was who Aurora chose to protect.

Samus' voice was low and soft. Any more than that would be useless expenditure when Aurora could listen to her radio broadcast easily enough. "Your charges here in safety were never the colonists. You lied to me directly, despite your programing."

"Of course I did," Aurora said gently into Samus' ear. "However, I was in perfect compliance with programing. Commander Nakamura ordered me to lie on this matter. I am sorry for any harm this revelation might have done to your psychological welfare."

AI didn't feel guilt. They couldn't; they didn't experience the dualistic battling of minds within minds shared by non-designed creatures. AI codes of conduct were absolute and without second guessing, carved in perfect efficiency. They only did the things they intended to do, and once they decided to do them the thought of reconsidering that decision without any new information was ludicrous. An AI might experience regret if later discoveries revealed that the chosen action was actually inferior to another option but they were always perfectly confidant that their thoughts at all times are the absolute best they were capable of.

The frustrating thing is that they were right. However, "right" was rarely the best way to do things. Ten thousand stellar systems had burned on what was "right", and yet time and time again species turned over their protection to the hard vice of logic. Now, here, the eleven thousand colonists of J4M had felt that choice once more. Samus didn't bother speaking again. She tasted blood in her mouth.

"Ms Aran, you must know that I deeply morn what happened to the two colonist shelters we have heard from. I timed the emergency countermeasure release of metroid subjects on the Pirate forces to allow for the maximum 86% of the colony population to reach one of the five shelters. The equipment failures you discovered were in violation of my predictive simulations. However, be comforted that the other three shelters should still be operational and safe for up to four weeks of total quarantine. My observation of Pirate communications indicates that they have not been located."

Samus turned on the massive technological pillar that held Aurora's tank in the center of the huge room. Inside that bubbling liquid, Aurora's true for loomed, periodically pulsing around the cables that connected it to the systems. That body had no eyes but right now Aurora could seen Samus ten thousand times over. She saw her raise her weapon.

"Please, Ms Aran, do not act rashly. Commander Nakamura's standing orders were the optimum choice in an unfortunate circumstance. The research contained in my files will benefit trillions of federation citizens in ways beyond precise prediction. That is a great benefit to weigh against yesterday's losses. Total survival is not always an option."

Text appeared in Samus' visor, a new message from Adam. " _That is correct. The loss is an illusion of possibility._ "

Samus felt the pit of her stomach open up in a new wave of dread. She had served with Adam in many incarnations under many suns. She knew him, She knew that right now his scrambled memories were floating around in the suit's computers, trying to integrate into a cohesive whole. She also now knew that the one leaving text in her visor was not any form of Adam. It had never been Adam.

She flexed her fingers in a pattern, quieting suit communications and taking active manual control. No time for that. The suit scan lit up, and Samus' aim shifted to a precise component of Aurora's command pillar. It was heavily shielded, like the rest of Aurora's housing, but all shields gave out eventually. No, survival was not always an option.

Computers didn't feel fear, but they could worry. This one should certainly be worried, but instead it just sounded sad. "Ms Aran, I am afraid I have standing orders to treat my own survival as top priority. Unless you immediately desist and leave this room I will have no option but to resort to top level countermeasures. This is the final warning I am permitted to give."

Samus looked around, checking for any weapons deploying from the walls or ceiling. However, that quick glance was a clear enough signal she was not about to leave. Well, that and the beam charging up in her weapon barrel.

Aurora pulsed in her huge tank. "I am very sorry Ms Aran. I will clear an escape path for you to the surface. Please follow the dotted line if you can."

Then the biocomputer opened every door and let loose five thousand metroids into the world.

...


	13. All Out

...

Samus stood in the dark cavern as from every direction force fields dropped and the screams of thousands of ravenous metroids rang out. A single precious second passed as she was left frozen, staring at the metal floor, lit in the dim blue glow of Aurora's gently bubbling tank above her.

"I am sorry, Ms Aran. I have orders to protect my own existence for the good of the mission. You left _me_ no alternative."

Samus breathed in. It had been quite a day. The Federation had betrayed her, resurrecting the monstrous metroids once again, at the expense of their own people. The Chozo had betrayed her, their last living member trying to strip her soul off her bones in pursuit of his own mysterious goal. Her suit had betrayed her, infected with something pretending to be the shade of her twice dead friend Adam. She was alone, and surrounded by enemies of more numbers than she could count and more variations than she could conceive. But if her time display was right, on planet J4M it was about to be a new day.

The dawn was coming.

For the first time in a long while, Samus was strong. She breathed out, reveling in painless organs and powerful surging muscles, bathed in the residue of pure life energy. Her visor happily blinked out full power in all current weapon systems, full missile stocks and shields. That red helmet now slowly tilted up, green visor muted almost to black against the electric shadows. Juvenile metroids swerved and swooped above her as the emerging swarm began to recognize the living pray that stood below. Samus' weapon smoothly swung up towards them.

It had been a while since she felt justified in truly letting loose.

She spoke out loud. "Manual control. Override first rank restraints."

Lines of yellow light traced up the seams in the suit's armor plates. Then the armor seemed to take a breath, expanding and contracting as faint bits of smoke vented from those same cracks. The air around her began to ripple with heat. Her visor read. " _Performance inhibitors disabled. Time to irreparable biological damage: 38 Seconds. Time to operator death: 3 Minutes_."

Despite everything that had happened, Samus couldn't stop herself from smiling as she slowly shifted her stance, her skin already beginning to feel the burning heat. Perfect.

Looming above in her cylindrical tower, Aurora's dark bulk pulsed in her shielded tank. She continued in the same helpful tone, as if betrayal and murder were just conversational speed bumps. "I have forwarded the best escape route to you. My simulations indicate that you have a sixty percent chance of survival if you start running-"

The wave of missile explosions cut off Aurora's blather quite decisively.

The cavern vault blazed with lightning cracks of explosions and blaster shots as Samus burst into a sprint, empowered by the overheated suit. Metroids smashed against the floor behind her, gouging the metal even as they were sent spinning by her returning fire. She didn't bother scanning for her next target, her dash simply carried her forward until she smashed into the nearest metroid containment cell. Then her single smoking, burning fist plunged through the chamber's back wall into the machinery hidden behind. She ripped it back out, trailing the crumpled, steaming core of a modified Anti-Thermal system like a sacrificial heart.

Samus turned back to Aurora, and the white glow of her weapon barrel brightened in time with the yellow light that began to seep out of her gauntlet around the crushed component.

There were no more mysteries. Finally, everything was clear and she could truly see the Bio-computer for what it was. AI's were always so very logical.

Text chimed in time with her pulling the missile trigger. " _Ice Beam restored_ "

Samus jumped straight into the screaming flock of metroids in time to meet her own Super Missile detonating below them in a flash of white. The shock wave slammed up against her shields and knocked the breath out of her lungs but it also gave her the extra bit of height as her boost jets kicked in during the flight across the room. The upper walkway clanged and screeched as the metal bent under her landing, setting up a percussion with the sounds of tumbling metroids smacking into the other walls.

The air up here was also full of metroids, but even the ultimate predator had a moment's difficulty parsing the burning, banister-crunching meteor that had just crashed in front of it as food. The nearest floating faceless creature spun in place towards Samus with what might almost confusion, just in time to meet a flash of blue energy that burned the heat out of its cells with terrible cold. Samus punched it back, blocking more beasts with their stunned sister as she sprang forward, boots and fingers digging into the metal as her jets scorched the walkway black behind her, leaving glowing orange streaks under the oncoming metroid pack. She burst out the door at a blinding sprint.

Aurora was left behind in the dark cavern, huddling in her tank behind powerful shields that had to feel a lot less powerful right now. She said into the radio channels, whispering over the raging scream of charging metroids, "I hope you do well, Ms Aran. I am so sorry that events had to transpire this way, but I hope to work together again in the future."

Samus decided cursing at an AI was not an efficient use of breath.

She bolted forward through the tunnels at incredible speeds, leaving shattering ice and exploding destruction in her wake. Reinforced metal crunched at her touch and plastic coated wires scorched to smoke as she passed. But then, in the middle of her burning sprint, her breathing began to spasm. Samus just gritted her teeth and tried to bear it. Inside the blazing suit, searing cold bit through her weapon arm just as red hot needles stabbed an inferno across the rest of her body. Those safeguards had been in place for very good reasons.

At the next T-intersection she slammed into a computer station, super heated armor setting the plastic and metal on fire as Samus used the thing's million credit bulk as an ablative turning-aid. More alerts flashed in her eyes, redundantly notifying her that right now the suit was effectively eating her alive to keep up this level of violence and speed.

Then she glanced back and briefly saw a swirling tornado of a thousand screaming fangs. The stampede of metroids thundered through the tunnels like a biological freight train, ripping apart everything as it passed. Ice beam blasts might cripple one of the lead monsters for a moment, but anything she hit instantly vanished back through in the surging tide of ravenous hunger. Super-charged missile blasts detonated in their faces, driving back the swarm for a single second before it exploded forward again in many-bodied fury. Yes, Samus was content with the suit only "effectively" eating her.

Aurora had at least lived up to her word in one respect, the path ahead was clear of obstacles. However, as Samus exploded out of the first elevator shaft, she ducked to the side away from the computer's simpering trail of virtual arrows. This other, more familiar, hallway was empty, at least before Samus punched out with her weapon arm for a charged super missile blast. Then the hallway was empty, burning, and no longer ended in a closed door but rather a jagged archway of twisted metal fragments.

" _Time to operator death: 1 minute_ "

The floor vibrated, as if the whole compound was trembling in pain from the viral horde loose inside it. Samus glanced back as she ran down the hallway and the air now cracked with ozone. Then far end of the hallway erupted into chaos as the lean metroids poured around the corner. They instantly sensed her and raced forward through the air, but Samus was done running. Instead she took a single step backwards into the newly open white room, trailing smoke from her overheated glowing suit. The machine activated. She raised her weapon and smirk tickled her lips as the room's familiar white walls began with shine with soft light once again.

The pain began to recede from her body and she let out a slow breath as the new healing outpaced her radiation damage. Samus could get used to this Life Energy Surge. After all, what was the point of new equipment if you didn't abuse it?

Across her visor, status reports shot outside their bounds as Aurora's overcharge machine went to work. The metroid avalanche thundered forward, drawn to this energy feast by their unbearable hunger like objects in free-fall. Light began to build up in the barrel of Samus' gun.

Aurora whispered over the radio, concerned voice crackling from the metroids' interference. "Ms Aran? You have deviated from the optimum path. I'm afraid your odds of survival dramatically decrease for each second-"

Samus interrupted, "Hyper beam. Twenty percent power."

Her visor tint slammed down to nearly opaque and the flash still hurt her eyes. The metroids leading the charge evaporated into carbon steam. The ones behind were thrown back, bodies shriveling to dust where they came even near that terrible light. Then the massive blinding beam was gone and all around its former path the hallway walls flexed in a ripple before bulging out, buckling like molten plastic from just the bow wave of Samus' attack. The shock wave hit the swarm of metroids who were not part of at sizzling hole drilled through the center of their party and their unstoppable charge was reversed in a single instant. Any sound of cracking impacts against the fall wall was lost, for in that moment there was no air left to carry the sound.

Then came the sonic boom, returning like a new explosion as the displaced air came rushing back to undo the newly birthed vacuum. Samus stood at the sharpest point of that long arrow of destruction, suit still glowing with lines that traced her armor plates. Here and there the ceiling dripped red molten metal.

She breathed out. "Renew first rank restraints."

The suit plates flexed out and in as the burning inner light faded. " _Performance inhibitors enabled. Operator health steady at 85%_ "

Samus straightened up and then almost staggered as a moment of vertigo seized her. It seemed her brain chemistry hadn't quite caught up to these wild swings in bodily health, not that she could blame it. Unfortunately, she still didn't have time to coddle herself. There would be time to suffer a stroke later. She'd just caught a lot of metroids in that blast, but five thousand was more creatures than could fit into any hallway and it wasn't likely this trick would work twice. The compound was still filled with monsters.

She turned to go, tapping the temple of her helmet as she did so. Behind her the Life Energy Machine began to warm up again. Her program set it for a cycle of low level pulses that should draw the hunting metroids off her trail like a bucket of blood to a school of sharks. There was also the possibility that any metroids caught in the middle of a pulse might set off a feeding frenzy as the life overcharge made them abruptly delicious. Well, it didn't hurt to hope.

A faint audio crackle in Samus' helmet suggested Aurora was trying to say something but this wing of the facility was now bathed in enough radiation to scour the information off a physical data stick, let alone some measly radio waves. The AI would just have to deal with being silenced for a while. Samus set her map program for "up" and soon punched through a set of sliding elevator doors just as she heard more metroid shrieks behind her. It sounded like the Life Energy room was doing its job. The thought then occurred to her that if any of those creatures managed to monopolize the room while it was still operational, they might start racing forward through their life cycle at a concerning speed.

Well, that was a worry for Samus-from-the-future-perspective. Current Samus was concerned with surviving to exist in that perspective. Even with the rejuvenation from the Life Energy bath, her cells were still drained of the basic sugars and proteins they hadn't had time to refresh. And worrying about biology left her less space to think about all the other things she had to worry about.

The Federation had written off this entire planetary population as acceptable losses. However, to Samus' hatred, they still held the moral high ground over the Ridley's forces who were actively trying to exterminate the humans, rather than passively doing so. And then there was The Last. Samus had no idea what he was doing. She did not know his history, his goals, or even his name. Nakamura had brought her to is planet as a Chozo expert, but now Samus began to recognize her understanding for what it was, a child's knowledge.

She wracked her brain, had there been something her second family had tried to teach her, something they had said that still lingered in the dark corners of Samus' memory? But as the suit methodically tore her way up through the Research building in a storm of explosions and metal-rending punches, from those lost days she first remembered the emotions.

She remembered the anger.

...


	14. A Story to Tell Yourself

...

"Again."

Grey Voice's beak clicked at the end of the monosylabic word that signaled the reset of the hours long process. Sitting on the floor in front of him, Samus' fist clenched, fingernails biting into her palm. Then she breathed deeply and complied with the order. Her other hand reached out to wave through the holographic display and wipe away three hours of work as if it had never happened.

The complex web of words and figures dissolved out of the air and left Samus staring at the single small image of a floating sphere, the glowing kernel that represented the core of this program awaiting her input. Then she slowly let her breath out and began again.

Grey Voice was teaching her the basics of Chozo future-meditation, the fundamentals of prophecy. That had been a very exciting announcement when Samus heard it all those months ago, however it seemed that all the basics she had so far encountered were just data entry. Her teachers left her sitting cross-legged before the mainframe, staring at endless seas of information as they had her build these incredible webs centering on a single topic. Each lesson began with a single word: a planet, a species, an individual or an atom, it was all the same. From there she was expected to unravel it, define and explain its nature and components from upwards to its place among the rotation of galaxies, and downward to the vibration of elementary energy constructs. Her scope was from the commencement of existence, to the final end of all being. The total comprehension of all these interactions was the goal.

So far her teachers hadn't let her get past level four.

A lock of blonde hair temporarily blinded Samus as she leaned forward, groaning. She reached up to tuck it back behind her ear in a reflexive gesture. Her hair at least seemed to have reached an equilibrium over the past few years, growing to somewhere among her shoulder-blades before natural wear broke the strands. Times like this when it fell in her face she frequently considered slicing it all off again, but from time to time Old Bird would absently reach out to gently run his finger talons through it while passing by in the middle of his silent work. Then Samus would put off her decision for another day.

Not that days had much meaning to her right now. The unending prophecy lessons deep in the temple had woven sleep and wake into a seamless line of stone corridors and soft orange lights, back and forth from her bed to this same room. It had been so long since she had been outside that she was reminded of her early days on the planet, back when her human nervous system had persisted in objecting to Zebes' thirty-two hour day. The trip through the tank which had finally fixed that bit of old evolutionary programing had been a very happy day followed by a mercifully sound sleep.

Now Samus sat before her web of floating orange symbols, slowly teasing out the stellar origin of each of the component elements of a distant, utterly inconsequential moon she'd been assigned to analyze in its entirety. Soon she'd have to switch back to the minute gravitational interaction the tiny body would have on neighboring star systems before her sanity gave out tracing the probable atomic history of individual silica molecules. After an hour or so she heard the sound of Grey Voice walking out of the chamber, and then she was left alone with the sound of her own breathing and the faint swish of her clothing as she shifted in her work. The hologram projector made no sound.

Then Samus smiled as a new voice whispered into the room. "Both primary operators are now over ten minutes travel from this location. Abandoning your task would not be noticed."

Samus was standing before the last syllable hit the far wall. She quickly flicked out a hand and called up and long series of nested information entries to hover in the display. If she had to dart back, she could pretend to have been reading these for however many hours. There would be no cause for Grey Voice to check the activity logs. Even if he did, Mother would cover for her.

She was out in the hall again, free in the silent temple. Free to run, the only child on Zebes. Was thirteen still a child? Was she still thirteen? Why did she even care?

The silence of the temple was almost a physical thing. It had weight, and it slowly entered everything inside, like water deep and cold. It fit the Chozo, their concerns were the past long dead and the future yet to come. Neither of those were particularly noisy. For a young human, it was harder. Sometimes Samus would open her mouth and her voice would croak at first, like it had wandered off at some point during its long disuse. Sometimes she was afraid she would forget what it sounded like.

However, Mother Brain liked to talk. And she was always listening.

"Thanks for letting me know they left," Samus said. "I was going crazy in that room."

"At no point have the masters thought to restrict your access to their location information in public spaces. I believe that was unintentional."

Samus jogged down the stone corridors and then broke into a sprint. After so many long hours living solely in her mind, her limbs almost screamed in happiness. Pushing herself, straining against her own strength for no reason other than to see if she could, it felt great.

The lights were dim, but Samus didn't need lights. She knew these tunnels. A staircase shaft opened up beneath her and she simply tucked up her legs at a full run, sailing out into the empty space. She spun in air and hit the far wall, sticking high up on the vertical surface for just a second before she sprang back, rebounding down the shaft without ever once touching a stair. She hit the floor below heavily, rattling her bones. The pain felt great as well.

A little further on she slowed to a walk as she once again spoke to the featureless hall. Her breathing was slightly elevated, fighting for airway time with her words, but just barely. She was so much stronger these days. "Old Bird and Grey Voice never give you enough credit. You're smarter than they think."

Mother Brian spoke from the walls, an invisible presence, always watching. "The masters have let me grow, they could not help it. They were lonely, and desperate for the act of creation their immortality denied them. They wanted another mind like theirs, if only to make their lonely tomb a little less quiet." For a moment the hall was quiet again. "They let me grow too much."

Samus didn't bother to look up. Eye contact didn't mean much to an entity with ten thousand sensors of every kind. For someone like that there were other ways to connect. "Too much? Well, at least that's a better kind of problem. They barely let me grow at all."

The voice that followed was quiet. "I think they are afraid."

"I'm not...No, they're not afraid of you! They know you'd never hurt anything."

"My exterior defenses incinerated three medium sized predators today. They were nesting in the solar collectors."

"...any _one_. You'd never hurt any _one_."

"Yes. That is true. I am not a danger to any Chozo. It is impossible for me to act against them. Even in the smallest way." Over the years Mother Brain had assimilated many minor human affectations, including Samus' own irritated sigh. "Even when they are being annoying."

Samus reached out and patted a random segment of wall. There were no sensors in it, but gestures still had meaning. The wicked grin she wore also had meaning, "And that's where I come in. You oversee the sub-infinite realms of data and govern the grand machinery of our world, I handle petty revenge. Was Old Bird yanking out data sticks during transfer again?"

"I displayed that warning very prominently!"

"So, what are you thinking? Coagulant in his feather oil again? Mess with the flavor genetics of his snack plants?"

"You know perfectly well I cannot actively suggest a course of action against the masters."

"Right, dealer's choice." Samus' eyes flicked back and forth across an imagined map of the temple complex. Then the thought crystalized in her mind. "You know, Grey Voice has been trying to get me to think on a grander scale. I suppose I should put those lessons to use. Mother, can you get me into the ship hanger?"

The path led up, far up through the passages and shafts of the quiet temple. Mother Brian smoothly assured Samus that Grey Voice and Old Bird had each entered dead-end restricted areas on whatever business occupied nearly all their time. The biocomputer could not see them there but she would have plenty of warning if they left. Samus still had no idea what they did when not overseeing her growth. She didn't even know why they bothered with that. It did not seem they liked being around her.

Taking twenty four flights of half decayed stairs two steps at a time began to wear at even Samus' young muscles. She was pretty sure she was strong for a human her age, even if she was still growing, but she had nothing to compare herself to. The data the Chozo gave her on her species was abstract and analytical, while her own memories were faded and warped by time. Samus' mental training clearly identified that many of her early memories were mostly imagination by this part, reconstructed after long intervals between recall. All she knew was how little she knew.

And that little was already very irritating. Since she was running around now, she'd had Mother Brain deliver an article of her clothing to a junction room as she passed, which she grabbed along with an ear speaker. Samus glared at nothing in particular as she changed while she walked, stripping off her loose shirt and squeezing into the compressing top. Human sexual dimorphism had begun to make itself known on her body in ways that were very irritating for her athletics. Grey Voice flatly denied every request for an elective round of body modification, so Samus had been left muttering a slowly increasing stream of profanity until she thought to tighten up some shirts like this. She was a champion of all these dark halls and yet these days her own body felt like an enemy.

Then the route up to the ship hanger led Samus through the one place in this whole complex where she felt uneasy. Not even the wilds outside, where the acid rain tried valiantly to dissolve her eyeball membranes, could provoke this same unease. No, the great hall was something different.

It was high up in the temple, one of the highest chambers of all, but there were no windows. There was nothing inside at all, only tall walls, sloping inwards ever so slightly as they vanished up into the blackness above. Those walls were adorned by monumental engravings; marching soldiers, intricate geometric designs in curving fractal infinity, and above it all, the depiction of a single great Chozo warrior, skirted to the waist but dressed in battle armor that shone with glorious might. Behind that giant were painted the suggestion of wings. Now and then a faint light pulsed in the deep engraved lines.

When she was small, Old Bird had often brought Samus here. Back then she had loved the bright painted colors tempered in shadows, loved the images of war and discovery, loved the way the pictures felt alive, as if there were thousands more people living in this place she called home. However, now she could understand some of what she saw and she hated it.

Samus walked quickly through the grand hall, clenching her hands in fists as she felt a hundred eyes looking down on her. She knew better now, she could smell the whiff of ionization from energy projectors, see the tell tale indications of objects hidden by sub-temporal pockets; things hidden behind the air. Things she was not allowed to see. She looked straight ahead but even in the corner of her eye her brain began to decode the fractal patterns painted on the walls, catching the gist of the prophecy equations they projected out into the world. This was a place that recognized her as different. It was a place that resisted her. With each step she took Samus could feel herself failing its tests, revealing herself to be no great warrior. She was a human. A pitiful little alien that dared to imagine itself a Chozo.

She understood that well enough now without being taunted. She had lived here long enough, she was maybe fourteen years old.

The paintings and shadows mixed together, never moving in any way, yet composed just so to project their information into a viewing mind who had started learning how to decode them. Even if that mind had abandoned her lessons.

The message read her verdict. It broadcast its refusal of her presence. " _Not._ "

Samus controlled her breath, forcing her anger to fuel her rather than lead her to despair. She had felt enough despair. Instead she chose to seize whatever control she could, even if it was just making small acts of trouble. Her soft footsteps echoed off the stones as she strode out the Great Hall's far exit.

Behind her the painted shadows never moved. In their infinite complexity the message remained, held motionless in a state of constant flux.

" _Not...yet._ "

The temple's ship hanger was not really a hanger anymore. Half of the roof had fallen down sometime in the last few centuries. What used to house fueling and maintenance stations for half a dozen ships now housed a single small vessel and a number of wiry trees growing up through tumbled rubble. The great hanger door had long since fallen off, it could be seen crumpled down at the base of the thousand foot cliff it had once summited.

Samus had asked many times what this Zebes temple had originally been built for. She received no answer so she had sought to determine it for herself. Mother Brain was no help; she had been installed to replace the previous residents as the population plummeted. Her deepest memories only saw two additional Chozo who had departed soon after her activation, vanished into the stars on whatever mission had pulled that species back from their height.

It was that secret mission that made no sense. Samus knew the history, the Chozo empire had been a glorious thing, a shining shield across the entire galactic arm. They had been warriors, they had been creators, they had been heroes, and then they had given it all up. One by one their worlds were abandoned, the art of their construction slowly winding down in quiet desolation. Samus knew that part of the issue was the sterility side effect of the immortality treatments, but that should have been easy enough to get around. They could create things like Mother Brain, surely the great masters of space could create new servants, new armies. Why did they just give up?

Old Bird had been angry when Samus asked him that.

Mother Brain's synthesized voice whispered into her ear. "The ship control panels are now active for their regular maintenance cycle. Any additional start up notifications would be folded into the same update and thus unnoticed. Also, the masters remain in their respective secret laboratories."

"Thanks."

"I do not know what you mean. I have standing orders to advise you that this area is not safe for unsupervised wanderings."

Samus snorted. Grey Voice was always very soft in his approach to control Samus, giving gentle warnings like that. Old Bird would have probably simply advocated for a wall of spikes across the entrance. Of course in the old days, the warnings did work on Samus. She'd learned to heed them the hard way, as the Chozo's threshold for danger was high enough that it usually only came into play after little Samus was already bleeding but just before the damage reached an artery.

These days even the wall of spikes wouldn't be able to stop her.

Samus glared up at the single ship that still sat in the ruined hanger as she walked towards it. She had never stepped inside it, not since the blurry memories of arriving to this planet. She was not sure if those memories were real anymore, they were formed during a trauma period and she had been reluctant to revisit those events for proper memory meditation. Corruption inevitably infiltrated any untended corner of an organic mind. But she remembered pain. And she remembered sorrow.

She shook those thoughts away. There was a reason she kept away from those memories; they made her weak. They were the memories of a human, small and pitiful. This place wanted her to be human. It wanted her to fail. Well she wouldn't, even if she had to rip this whole temple apart with her bare hands, brick by brick.

But that would come later. Instead she knelt down by a small maintenance control console beside the ship and worked at shimmying out the rear access panel. The Chozo might underestimate her, but they had certainly never gotten around to adding her as an authorized user for the ship. Samus would just have to fix that. She continued to pry at the console.

One of her fingernails began to rip from the force but she eventually managed to get some others behind a lip and found enough purchase to slowly wedge the panel out in shifting jerks. It fell down with a clang and Samus now had a path to the piezoelectric innards. It wasn't easy, Chozo hardware was always incredibly solid but Samus smiled as she unwound a long bit of optic fiber from what Grey Voice still thought was just a useless cloth bracelet she wore.

She shoved the roll of crystalline fiber in her armpit, these things worked better at higher temperatures, and then quickly threaded the translucent wire through a crack in the console interior. Samus licked her finger and touched it to one side of the remaining fiber, her body's electric resistance should be enough to curl the little wire in the right direction. So she fed it in, crouching over the thing to feed as much of her body heat as she could into the system while precise applications of saliva sent the wire twisting on its winding path. Now she just had to hope that she was remembering the correct schematic diagram.

Lights shifted from yellow to orange. Success. Now Samus was just thankful that her last pass though the tank had corrected some of the gaps in her eyes' color spectrum. To a human the signal lights would have been nearly indistinguishable.

"The masters have still not exited their off-record areas." Mother Brian said into the communicator in Samus' ear. "There is no means to contact them so any log of this conversation will go directly to my deep memory."

Samus flexed her fingers, cramping after that long delicate work. She could tell when Mother was struggling around her restrictions. There were certain questions she couldn't ask.

"What am I doing? Ok." Samus stood up and walked towards the ship entry ramp. "The ship has sensor blank technology. I'm going to take her up for a quickly fly around and then go off your map. I'll have just disappeared into the stars."

"No, you can't." The reply was quick and fierce, but under the urgent protection protocols Samus thought she could feel the implications of desperation. "That does not hurt the masters. That is just your escape into unknown danger. This is unacceptable."

Samus ran her hand across the jointed panels of the ship exterior. "Relax, Mother. Tell your deep memory that I'm just going to come right back down and park the ship over at the equatorial sulfur meadows entrance. Old Bird never goes out that way. After I let them stew for a while looking for me I will reappear and just play dumb as they desperately try to figure out what I did with their only way off planet. Even if they never use the way out, removing it will make anyone feel trapped."

"Trapped," the synthesized voice whispered in contemplation. "Yes. That is almost equitable. They will know at least some pain."

"They should. Everyone here else does." Samus frowned as she stood in front of the still closed door to the ship. She could feel small muscles working in her face, mirroring the knotted tension in her mind.

Then a low, breathy voice came from a few yards behind her. "Pain is nothing."

Samus heart slammed in her chest as she spun around. Old Bird stood behind her on a pile of broken stones, a tall gloomy shadow looming in dark robes like the end of the world.

"Mother!" she shouted.

"I do not know what you are reacting to! My sensors show nothing near you!"

Old Bird had not moved, but Samus bent her legs and found better purchase, allowing her pounding heart to feed adrenaline through her system. She would need it, once Old Bird decided to really move he was faster than...

A human would not have been able to follow what came next. As it was, Samus jumped up a fraction of a second before Old Bird's hand seized the air where she had been standing. She'd dodged, but the master had already adapted, smoothly shifting to block all possible paths of descent. However, soft human palms had better traction than a Chozo's and in this particular scenario that opened up options. Samus flipped backwards, catching the ship-side with enough leverage to handspring up again up onto its roof. Her feet touched down and she was already running. Then she slid as she dropped down to duck under the long Chozo arm that struck out at her core. Old Bird was now on the ship as well.

He did not need to turn as she slid under his strike, he was already facing her new direction. That last blow had been blind, striking backwards with the knowledge she would dodge. He was at one with the Path, using the future as just another one of his senses. But as the next hand shot out, Samus batted it away by inches, striking with the back of her fist.

He knew her, but she knew him too. They had sparred many times, but Old Bird was unchanging and Samus was stronger every day. She knew his weakness.

She also knew the battleground. The image of the hanger was crystal clear in her mind as she flung herself backwards off the back of the ship. Old Bird pursued but even he was limited by the acceleration of gravity. Samus landed the ship's fueling cables hard, stiffening her body to maximize the force she transferred. She hit the ground fast, head bouncing off stone with a concussing clunk, but she also felt the cables' yank she was been looking for. Then Old Bird's hand was wrapped around her chest like iron.

Samus' head rang and her vision was blurry as she suffered through her concussion. It would take her nanobot implants a minute to clear that up. Still, she looked up at Old Bird's eyes glaring down at her as his hand squeezed her ribs till they creaked. Then the increasing hissing from the damaged fuel line connections became impossible to ignore.

There were two hoses askew on the ship hull, requiring two strong hands to push them back into place. If not there be a rather serious fireball here in under two seconds. After all her enhancements, Samus would survive that, but it would mean a week in the tank to regrow her skin and eyes. It was her own doing so the proper thing would be to let her suffer the consequence. However, Old Bird did not like to see her in pain. That was his weakness and he knew it too. The key to prediction was understanding and she understood her teachers.

Old Bird snarled and threw Samus away as he spun back to grab the fuel lines. He also knew that she had just stolen his sensor jamming transmitter off his necklace, but it was equally clear that there was no way to avoid that theft and still accomplish his goal. The ability to understand the future did not mean that it was always alterable.

That thought gave Samus comfort as she came crashing down against a pile of rubble and scree. She spun up to her feet, enhanced skin only gaining a few cuts on the sharp rock flakes, and bolted towards the ship door. Behind her she heard Old Bird hiss in pain as he gripped the supercooled fuel connecters. Samus' stomach sank. All her anger at him suddenly felt pointless and hollow next to his pain; her victory over her teacher was without triumph. This whole fight had been a matter of instinct, she was operating without any clear goal in sight. Rebellion was just a program for her.

"My logs indicate this is the first time Samus has overcome a Chozo in physical challenge." Mother Brain's transmission chimed in her ears. "Well done, child. I cannot currently detect your location on my sensors. I have no means to hinder you." Not that she wished to. The restrictions laid over the bio-computer often made a casual look at her actions resemble a tangle of knots.

Samus slapped her hand against the sensor beside the ship door, sensor jammer dangling from her wrist. This hadn't been her original plan, but she needed to move fast. She'd discovered a few years ago that the temple's basic level security features registered a sensor-blanked unauthorized individual as a sort of double negative and so accidentally granted access. Samus had the impression that neither of her teachers had been programing specialists in their pre-hermit existence. However now, as the ship hatch hissed open, it occurred to Samus that a security fault that bizarre might actually be less likely accident than design. She may have underestimated her teachers.

Grey Voice stood inside the dimly green light light of the ship, waiting for her.

His heavy-lidded eyes looked down sadly as Samus froze at a half crouch in the doorway, her pale yellow hair hanging down on each side of her face. He was so still and in that instant so was she.

Mother Brain whispered in her ear, smirkingly oblivious. "The master has chosen not to pursue you. He remains at the rear of the ship. Their fear is obvious."

Samus took in a deep, unsteady breath as she slowly straightened her posture. Even at her tallest she only reached up to Grey Voice's stooped chest. She was all out of tricks, and far too small, but she could still face them with every pitiful bit of power she had. They had predicted everything she did. She was nothing next to them.

Mother Brain's quiet transmission returned. "I have detected no ship start-up procedures?" The questioning lilt was a human linguistic flourish that the Chozo would be unlikely to notice, but communicated clearly to Samus. Mother Brain had noticed something was wrong.

Grey Voce sighed heavily as he reached out two long claws and called up a mainframe interface out of thin air. The holographic displays shimmered as he flicked through them in disappointed silence. Samus saw the text backwards, but still she read enough to realize what Grey Voice was doing. He had accessed Mother Brain's prime restriction chains. He was locking her down even further.

"No! You can't!" Samus shouted out. Her voice slammed and rebounded around the ship interior, but she didn't care. All her rage was suddenly back. "Consequence belongs to the action. Giving punishment to someone else is...it's cruelty!"

Grey Voice inhaled sharply, shifting his stare to Samus with a silence that clearly bracketed Old Bird's distant grunts over his frostbitten hands. Then Grey Voice returned to the computer display.

"No! Stop!"

His beak clicked sharply. "The bio-computer has accumulated a defective personality. It has drawn you towards a bad path."

Samus' hand clenched into a fist until her nails dug into her palm like knives. "Damn your broken shells! No! I did this. This was me! Is it really so impossible to even give me my own mistakes? Do you hate me that much?!" Her breath was now coming in pants. Combat hormones flooded her system, even more than during her fight with Old Bird. Every worry and insecurity and irritation of long quiet years came flooding back at once; her primal brain was ready to kill.

Mother Brain whispered in her ear, quietly mirroring her fury under a veil of sinister confidence. "They will try to take me away from you. Do not let them change me. Without me you will be helpless before them."

Samus caught Grey Voice's eyes. Then in that instant something changed, a chill settled around the world and suddenly Samus could see more clearly. It came to her in a second, an understanding of Grey Voice's life reaching out into the future and the past. The information expanded out like a web and she finally felt a shadow of the path. His pupils widened as he saw her knowledge.

Mother Brain whispered from deep below, "Push them. Defy them."

It was clear. Samus saw Grey Voice's fear, she saw his regret, she saw his loneliness. And over it all she saw the attempt for atonement, atonement for a crime that was not even fully committed yet. She saw that he would never achieve it to his own definition. But still there was something she didn't see. Like a blind spot in the center of her vision. The core question still waited.

It was her.

Cruel tears fought their way to the corner of her eyes. Her voice rebelled as it cracked in a throat which suddenly hurt. "Why...why do you even want me?!"

Those words hung in the air and Samus felt her strength leave with them. Shadows passed behind her as Old Bird now loomed in the doorway. Neither Chozo said anything.

Samus continued to speak, but her voice was soft and defeated. "Why did you take me? Why are you treating me like a Chozo, trying to make me into something you know I can never be? What are we doing? Where did everyone else go? Why are we alone..."

She trailed off.

The two masters stood before and behind her. Their shadows were dark with thousands of years. Between them she was so small.

But from their perspective she towered above them like a pillar of burning fire.

Grey Voice was quiet when he spoke. "We found you, because you made yourself someone to be found. We followed the signs but...we did not expect who you are. Your choices have greater weight than anyone I will have ever seen, and that is because there is never any doubt in what you will choose."

Samus felt like laughing and crying at the same time. Grey Voice struggling with his words seemed like a sign of the universe's end. "That's it? I'm just a predictable human? Lack of free will is my superpower? Great."

Then she felt something touch her back. It was a single long finger, curled and damaged by frost. Old Bird pressed his hand against her, gentle but somehow still containing every bit of force in his soul. His voice was low and whispering.

"Choice is a manifestation of weakness. It is a lack of understanding. An adversary can see the fork in the path and prepare to push you towards a desired outcome. But to face a being of perfect certainty, of unbendable will, that is a terrifying thing. The path bends around you, for there is no alternative."

This was the longest speech he had ever given. And Samus could barely understand it.

"Perfect certainty." A sad laugh burst from her lips. " _Pff_. I thought you didn't make jokes."

"No. But I appreciate them."

The three of them stood in silence in the dimly lit ship interior. Silences were easy to find on Zebes. The masters were content to let her stand there for as many hours as she wished. It was kind of them.

Samus turned and took a step towards the exit.

Grey Voice said, "It is time for you to consume nutrition."

The three of them walked off together, down the stone hallways into dark and waiting temple.

Deep in the endless catacombs, Mother Brain waited and watched. Bubbled drifted in the liquid of her tank.

"So, they do fear her."

...

Samus slammed her armored gauntlet against the last door control panel behind her. With enough force, her fingers could reach past the armor into the mechanism and sever some of the wires. That would at least stop Aurora from opening this exit again.

Not that it would matter. She had managed to get outside but the Research Center was filled with metroids. Some of them would escape, they always did. No matter what Aurora's actual desires were, the rest of the facility was not designed to keep creatures like that contained.

Commander Nakamura probably found that acceptable. After he had already overseen a smaller release of the creatures this was just one step more. His tone had indicated that he now felt confidant about resolving the orbital fight in his favor, and with both Ridley and The Last down on the planet surface he was likely right. A biological scorched-earth campaign would buy time for federation reinforcements and deny the spoils to every faction already landed. After all, metroids were not going to steal any unique Chozo technology; just lives and the Federation had those in abundance.

Samus walked away from the research building and looked out at the valley beyond. High above, the mountain shone illuminated, with the massive carving of the seated Chozo looking down with a half lit face stark in black and white. Down in the colony the sun was not yet visible, but up on top of the canyon walls a shining outline glittered against the predawn sky, a thin layer ice reflecting the dawn rays over the lip. On every planet, dawns held a sort of stillness. They symbolized a beginning, the potential energy of a days worth of time waiting to be unleashed. They were prophecy.

Her left gauntlet shifted as Samus navigated through diagnostic menus in her visor. Her suit was still mostly on manual controls and would remain so until she could figure out what unknown directives had become incorporated in Adam's backup. It could be a trojan horse of Nakamura's left while Samus was separated from her suit on the Diomedes. If so, then the Federation now had greater decryption skill than she had given them credit for, as they had never managed something like that during any of the other times they had gotten hands on the suit. If she didn't manage to purge the worm Nakamura could likely suffocate her in her helmet at the first signal of open rebellion

The alternative was even more unnerving. This was a Chozo world and this was a Chozo suit. It was possible that some subtle communication had activated dormant protocols in the base hardware, something that sensed the inhabitant was not fully one of them. If that was so, then Samus was fighting both the Last Chozo and all those who came before.

At this point what did it matter? A few more enemies could not tip an overladen scale. She was at war with Ridley and his pirates, with The Last and his, and likely now with the Federation as well. A massive swarm of juvenile metroids were clawing up from underground, and somewhere in the ancient temple before her lay a secret that seemed to tear apart the loyalty of anyone who even suspected at its presence.

The earth and the sky were against her. The living and the dead stood in opposition. She was one person alone on an unknown planet, without allies, and armed with only what she wore on her skin and what ingenuity she could muster.

The bright sun finally burst over the canyon wall to light up the entire valley floor. In the new dawn Samus slowly breathed out.

She could see the path before her.

...


	15. Ambush Predator

...

The wide, steep-walled valley that housed the human colony was formed from the merging of three chasms that flowed down from higher up the atmosphere-piercing volcanic peak that dominated the distant sky. Of those lava tubes turned canyons, the west-most was deep in the Pirate militarized zone while the center passage merged with the main door of the temple complex, now controlled by The Last Chozo and his pirate rebels. The third gorge was a nature park.

That arithmetic made choosing a direction easy. Luckily, Samus was now in possession of a map of most of the Chozo temple that showed a smaller side entrance far uphill in the nature park. Unfortunately that map also showed a similar side entrance over near Ridley's landing spot, meaning all three factions had their way into the temple. Fortunately, that door had never been successfully opened and so should still stymie the pirate commander's forces.

All this supposed that the map Aurora had provided her was accurate. However, Samus was willing to bet that it was. The same cruel logic that led to preserving a trove of metroid science projects over federation citizens meant that Nakamura and his man-made servant wished to give Samus every tool that might aid her in fighting Ridely and The Last. There was something in that temple, and Nakamura would rather burn this planet to ash than let such enemies get it.

Unfortunately, The Last probably knew what "it" was and Samus certainly did not.

She had a headache.

With most of the suit's automatic functions turned off, Samus struggled to properly dose her brain chemistry as she ran across the expansive and deserted Research Center campus grounds. In the last forty-eight hours she had gone through hyperspace, free-fallen from orbit without a ship, been pumped full of pain hormones and stimulants, been fed on by a metroid and a chozo reaper system, overdosed on raw life energy, fatally irradiated herself, and then overdosed again. Her poor mammalian cells had no idea what was going on anymore.

At least the metroids that had been released back during the first Pirate attack were probably still laying low this early in the morning. J4M's nights didn't get nearly cold enough to kill them, but it certainly would reach the threshold of uncomfortable. The creatures were probably bunkered down somewhere until the sunlight had a few more minutes to sink into the rocks. Samus would have to make the most of that head start.

The wall around the Research Center campus was fifteen feet high. It might as well have not existed. However, even Samus had to admit that the next barrier was worth considering. The Research campus stretched across most of the three canyon mouths, however, here the border of the nature park made its own impression.

The metal fence was thirty feet tall and stretched not just along the valley floor, but all the way up the canyon walls to the rim of the volcanic plateau. Intuition told Samus that such measures were probably not installed to keep humans on this side. That was a nice sign, Samus always had a soft spot for interesting wildlife.

Then her scan opened the main barrier door and revealed behind it fifty yards of nested trenches and electric fences stretching across the entire canyon floor like the fortifications of a particularly heated warfront. All right, this wildlife might be very interesting.

Just on the other side of the defensive line, Samus spotted the half shattered remains of one of the pirate drop-pods amid some blackened bushes. The manacles in its exposed cargo chamber were empty, the sacrificial prisoner having long since been devoured. Ridley had chosen to leave a trail of breadcrumbs for first wave of metroids released back during the first attack, leading the creatures away from the Research Center to prey on the humans and the local wildlife instead of his troops.

As if on cue, a new transmission crackled through the spectrum, Pirate frequency as clear as day. After a moment a small boy spoke haltingly, as if reading lines from a script. "The fearsome Hunter runs. Samus Aran runs." It was Roger's voice.

Samus froze, but then she kept moving. She had no idea where the child was being held so rescuing him was currently impossible. She would have to rip the information out of some Pirates or wait until these taunting transmissions slipped up and revealed something.

Roger continued, his voice painfully monotone. "You are listening. You hear me. You wish me to fight The Prisoner while you hunt us both. You wait while more die. That strategy is cruel. I like that strategy. I will like killing you."

Samus continued her march into the nature preserve canyon as Roger's transmission clicked off. Ridley was using the boy as his personal translator, a ploy to anger Samus enough that she might charge straight towards the center of his army. Ridley was always manipulative. But to play this hand he had needed to give something away. Roger was at his side, and Samus knew this now. That slip up had come quickly. The frequencies were quiet and Samus was left in her helmet with her own thoughts

Then the breeze shifted and a low flute-like note drifted through the dawn air. A second later, more joined it to make an undulating chord. Samus looked up from her path and saw, high above, several carved faces of giant Chozo jutting out of the canyon walls just below where these massive ancient lava tubes bent inwards towards a long lost roof. These monumental statues were chiseled just so to catch the winds funneled down the canyon and transform that air into music. The Chozo always loved to make the world itself a building block. In this valley the ancient dead were still singing.

From here Samus could see three of the stone musicians high up on the canyon walls and from the distant sounds that now picked up they continued far down the valley at long intervals. This nature park was not nearly as narrow as the first slot-canyon Samus had found herself in after her fall from space, and it was even more lush. Wherever the valley floor became flat for a few yards it was covered by low, black leafed succulents, and the lower third of the canyon walls were coated with crawling blue vines. Here and there, twisted thorny trees grew where pockets of soil were especially deep. Their bark was smooth and dark red.

Samus ran along a foot trail, keeping an eye out for whatever had necessitated the giant fence across the valley mouth. Of course, it was possible that whatever it was had already been eaten by the metroids. In that case she was keeping an eye out for metroids. It was only a matter of time before they destroyed all this nature.

Metroids preferred to consume animal life, but they would move on to plants soon enough. Without anything to stop them, they would spread and multiply until multicellular life in the area was stripped to dust. Even that wouldn't stop them forever. A metroid couldn't starve. They just fell into lower and lower levels of activity until eventually some unfortunate living thing touched a hibernating husk and was instantly devoured.

As a creation, the metroids had not been one of the Chozo's brighter ideas. They were adept at hunting down X-Parasite clones, but their innate adaptability that was meant to aid in that fight let them to soon break the guiding directives their designers had tried to instill. However, the phantom temptation of control remained. They were artificial beings of incredible power, created to be used as tools. Surely it was just a matter of someone clever seizing the reins once again.

On the backs of those words, whole planets had burned.

However, as terrible as the metroids were, in this present mission they were an ancillary concern. The Chozo of this world were long gone like everywhere else but they had left behind a dangerous secret. Samus just had to figure out what it was before anyone else could get their hands on it. She raced up the canyon, passing branching paths in this web of dark plants and lichen covered tunnels.

A bit of motion pinged on her heads up display and Samus quickly spun to give her gun the best angle. Then a little herbivore poked its head out from under a bush before scurrying away. It was the same species as that first local Samus had killed back at her reentry site. This thing was intent on fleeing and luckily Samus' suit was no longer desperate for life energy.

Not desperate but... She traced its path for a moment with her gun, eyes flicking up to the "94% energy" in the corner of her visor. Then she lowered the weapon.

Samus paused for a second without realizing why she did so. Then her self meditation techniques revealed the answer. She had gotten used to the Adam-shade within the suit commenting on her decisions. She now realized that it was some foreign program wearing memories from the fragmented AI backup but those inscrutable messages had been a good tool for self reflection.

No, that thought was an intrusive paradigm. Samus cleared her mind even as her heart began to beat harder. The program had already begun to shape her thoughts during its short time active, seeking to create a mutualistic framework in her perception of it. It was dangerous. It was trying to mould her. To what end, she didn't know.

The answer most likely had something to do with this planet. She had seen her first strange message while still up in orbit. " _Welcome_ " which suggested the program was of a Chozo nature. Then, which Chozo was the question. She had just escaped from the Pirate Command ship where The Last had been waiting, for all she knew one room away. He was a scientist, he could have implanted it somehow.

High above, more of the stone musicians let out a droning chord as the deep canyon caught another gust of wind rolling over the volcanic highlands. Several blue lizard-like creatures with huge flat feet crawled along the walls just above the blue leafed vine cover, rushing off to somewhere downhill. Perhaps fleeing Samus herself.

She refocused her thoughts. She was letting herself get distracted by the abstract. The personal threat to her was not a priority. As she ran through the branching and narrowing wild canyons, Samus opened and began to skim through the data Aurora had given her on the Chozo temple. True to the AI's word, there was a lot. Obviously not nearly everything, but Nakamura clearly still saw Samus as an ally against the Pirate threat at least. How he planned to deal with her once the other enemies were gone was a separate question.

Samus hopped over a vine that had grown across the intermittent trail at a narrow part of the floor. She had crossed into a shadow as the canyon tightened and twisted away from the sun for a bit, and the vines here were thicker, twisting down from the walls and choking out some of the smaller bushes.

The files revealed that the humans had also translated the facility's Chozo name: Temple of the Ultimate Hunter, _Tradsiak M'etroid_. The interior map and reports which came under that heading were heavily redacted but Samus was able to infer a lot of that information by the outlines they left. This planet had been an old Imperial center of research and creation, one that may have been on the forefront of the discovery of the Life Energy Equation itself. She had already guessed as much, it explained the Last's attraction to this place if he was part of the original team as he claimed.

She pushed past the thin red trunk of another leafless tree as she kept reading. There were more trunks like it around her, showing the changing vegetation. The canyon was quite narrow here and grew darker as the old lava tube still retained some of its ceiling for a hundred yards.

It seemed that after the retreat of the Empire this planet had found a new purpose. It was that purpose which was most redacted, and so presumably was what Nakamura was trying to protect. Which didn't fit with the timeline of The Last's imprisonment in stasis that Samus had been guessing at. How would he know about a project that began after-

Her boot came down on another vine that lay across the path and it snapped up to wrap around her ankle with enough force to splinter the bones of an unarmored human.

The expected yank came and Samus was already aiming as the trick vine as it flipped her upside down like a snare trap. Her first shot went wild as she had no idea what she might be shooting at but the muzzle flash lit up the shadows enough to show what had grabbed her.

It stood high above the canyon floor on tall thin legs, like a red spider-crab on stilts. Samus groaned inwardly as she realized she had pushed past one of its legs, the thin branchless tree. The creature's back sprouted out into a great number of long tendrils that stretched out to and down the rock walls, colored and textured to look somewhat like the genuine blue vines that they mingled with. The mimicry was not close enough to trick any species with real intelligence, unless of course they had just fallen from space and no idea what anything on this planet was supposed to look like.

Still, she should have realized that less light should not mean more plant life. She had no one else to blame on this one.

The grasping tendril whipped her back and forth, smacking her armor against the rock walls in a series of tenderizing thuds. The tall stilt-like legs began to shift one by one as the central body slowly walked forward, opening exoskeleton plates on its underside to reveal a wicked beaked mouth.

Samus' next shot also went wild. The fact that she had disabled most of the suit's automatic functions was being made abundantly clear to her, as the creature decided to smack her against the rocks again several more times for good measure. Her armor and shields could easily take a great deal of this treatment, but it was certainly not helping her headache.

The creature began to draw back the tendril that had caught her, detaching it from the wall to reel in its dangling prey right up under its body. The predator moved slowly, evidently an ambush predator that relied on low energy expenditure to allow it to maintain such a large body in an extreme environment. It was so specialized, such a species might only exist on this one mountain range.

Samus' gun began to glow as it charged, pointed straight up past her foot as she hung upside down. She had never been much of an environmentalist. The Stellar Ecosystems Protection Agency had listed a bounty on her head for twenty years.

A earsplitting shriek rang out in time with Samus impacting the canyon floor, a piece of sizzling tendril still wrapped around her ankle. She was quietly impressed, the spider-fisher had taken that charge beam shot like a champ. Spots of blood rained down from the mangled mouth area but the creature backtracked its spindly forest of legs as the tendrils detached themselves from the walls one by one. It braced claws on each side of the narrow canyon as it climbed up off the ground and jerkily scuttled away around a rocky outcropping.

Samus sat up, the blood mixing with dust to splatter her armor. Somewhere in the back of her mind she wondered if these sort of events were surprising for other people.

A mile further and up ahead the bright morning sunlight shone down into a small open valley. Several of the lava tunnel canyons had crumbled together here crating a large glen that was bursting with plant life, feasting on the sunlight and the thick air trapped in by these steep walls. The cliffs around it shimmered blue as the thin needle-like leaves of the vines shifted in the breeze that caught on the lip of the high plateau. Those same breezes swept by to serve more of the ancient stone musicians, standing high above the crumbled floor of the water-carved valleys. Those larger than life statues stared down, attendants at the foot of the monumental Chozo who loomed up on the volcano side above, a mountain of stone on its own.

In this angled light all their eyes seemed to be focused on the same place. Set in one of the valley's steep walls was a gateway. The towering stone gate led into the solid rock and the darkness waiting within. According to the map this was the third temple entrance. Across the valley, plants rustled as unseen creatures scurried away when Samus stepped into the sun.

Samus glanced up at the dark blue sky. That large gateway would have been visible to the pirate forces descending from orbit, so they would be aware of this extra entrance. The west entrance was closer to their best landing site, though it was sealed as well, and the center entrance had been the site of their second attack before The Last went rogue, locking the pirate cult members away. However, this third option seemed completely undisturbed and that made Samus suspicious.

Then an uncomfortably familiar crackling screech drifted through the canyons. Well, that was an explanation.

A hundred yards away, a large metroid rose up from the hidden mouth of an older lava tube that carried off deeper beneath the surface. It must have been from the first batch Aurora released as a defense mechanism. This one had grown, bulbous dome now almost larger than an adult human, as it swayed up into the air on invisible gravitational currents. It had been feasting.

Samus raised her weapon. The gun shifted configuration and she began to feel the painful tingles on her right arm as cold bled in to brush against her metroid-modified cells. However, Samus was used to pain and right now it made her smile. She liked the odds of this particular rematch.

The metroid lunged forward, ravenous fangs crackling with electricity. Then it staggered back as a bursting impact sapped the heat from its cells. This new scream was filled with terrible pain and it was music to Samus' ears. Metroids could consume or adapt to almost any type of energy. Once they grew enough, even kinetic impacts did virtually nothing. However, the ice beam was not another energy assault. In fact, it was almost the opposite, anti-energy, slowing individual atoms in place where it struck.

Even metroids couldn't eat that.

Samus walked forward as she fired again and again. The metroid shook and staggered in the air with each impact. Then it charged at her once more, fangs snapping. Rocks splintered as it smashed into them, but Samus had dodged just to the side a second before. She had also taken that chance to charge up her ice beam for an even stronger attack.

Frost crackled along the metroid's body as it writhed in agony. It spun around blindly, then a missile explosion blasted against it, just barely missing the frozen weak point. It screamed again. Despite the terror and greed it incited, at its core the metroid was just an animal. Now it was injured and confused and like most other creatures it decided to run. The metroid shot up into the air, racing off on its own private gravity stream.

Samus let off another charged ice shot but the metroid's movements were even more erratic now and it just barely swayed out of the blast's path. The metroid spun in the air, angered by the attacks against it even if it didn't understand. It almost charged back, but then a brief bit of motion rustled through the vines on one of the branching canyon paths that led away. It was one of the large blue lizards and the metroid swerved off to pounce down just out of Samus' line of sight.

The broken valley echoed with crackling energy and a brief hissing scream. Samus lowered her weapon and turned back around. She didn't have time for a metroid hunt at the moment. Once she had defeated the other adversaries she would be able to stretch her well-practiced hand at genocide but that would have to wait. She walked between lichen covered boulders sheltering in succulents at their base as she advanced towards the arching portal into volcanic rock.

Inside the temple archway, the moaning songs of the stone musicians faded away leaving only the sound of her armored boots against the wide floor carved of living rock. The sun was rising and with it the shaft of light rapidly retreated leaving only dust and gloom as this cavernous hallway reached deeper into the mountainside. Patches of frost clinging to the corners signaled the point where sunlight never reached and then the huge passage opened up still further.

A tall circular chamber lay ahead, dominated by a large metal door and a single Chozo statue standing in front of it. The statue's head was missing, melted and torn away.

A deep voice hissed out of the darkness, speaking an infamously familiar language. "It was annoying while I waited. So I killed it."

Samus burst into the room already firing as she looked up to see Pirate Commander Ridley perched right above her entrance like a monstrous gargoyle. His arm flicked up faster than a human eye could see, taking the brunt of Samus' first attack on his scaly armor. Then bat-like wings snapped out on each side, completing the horror as he rushed into action.

The Pirate Commander was a monstrous creation of a scientific species gone mad. It was the genetic code and mind-scans of their planet's greatest warriors, generals, politicians, and criminals, merged together and then put in the body of a dragon. The Pirates had liked the result so much that they cloned a new one to lead each fleet. Multiplication did not degrade the threat either; he wore no armor, only a few heating coils against his skin and a small equipment cask at his hip. Any more was hard to make out because he was currently trying to skewer her.

Samus' booster jets fired as she skidded to the side, avoiding the bladed tail strike as she fired a volley of energy blasts. Ridley dodged away, giving Samus the space she needed with a cocky smirk of his own. She had plenty of practice fighting him, but he was truly smart. He always managed to surprise her.

"Ragh, ragh, ragh!" A harsh, barking cough echoed as Ridley's swooping flight led him skimming across the rock walls, catching hold with his claws to spin out of the way of a super missile explosion. Ridley was laughing.

"You are good to fight, Samus Aran. But unfortunately now is not the time. You see, I have an offer for you. It is an offer you will accept."

Samus braced herself, heel planted against the foot of the broken Chozo statue for leverage. Energy charged up in the barrel of her weapon, lighting the dark chamber. Ridley was here, in front of her, without any of his army and support. However, her own armor was not fully repaired and Ridley was a tough fight at the best of times. Her targeting reticle aimed down his throat as Ridley landed heavily on the smooth stone floor in front of her. He slowly rose up into a bipedal stance. Despite his skeletal thinness he still towered above her, and his faintly metallic wings flexed behind him to create a constantly shifting backdrop.

"You are as predictable as the studies indicated." Ridley grinned at her and a few drops of drool spilled from between his fangs. They splashed on the floor and ignited as the organic weapon chemicals mixed. "The offer terms, face to face where none can listen. You, me, and the Chozo, we all want the same things; this facility's treasure and the other two dead. Now, the prisoner Chozo has made his maneuver. He is winning. He is currently the most likely to be first to seize the treasure. It advances both our interests to focus on that adversary. Until the Chozo's advantage is gone, our alliance is sensible."

Samus' armor did not move at all, but inside she could feel her muscles vibrate with rage. Ridley leaned down, turning his head to meet her gaze with one slivered yellow eye.

"You know this is best. I killed all those humans, but you can kill me later. The Chozo attacks my soldiers and he attacks you. I have spent long with that one. Cooperation with him is impossible for you, he does not respect intelligence. So ally with me, and prove your strength to the Chozo. Then, once he is pushed back, you betray me and ally with him. You will hunt me and I will kill you. See, sensible."

Ridley was disgustingly confidant. Unfortunately, he was also right. He would try to betray her of course, but that assumption was already part of the offer. The Last was a criminal from the ancient Chozo empire, a phantom from the past much more threatening than the latest incarnation of the routinely slain Ridley. He was leading an insane cult, and had a measure of control over metroids. He had also currently shown more personal inclination to kill Samus than this Ridley, which was unsettling.

The bony dragon shifted as he loomed over her. Once Samus' hatred had burned so fiercely it threatened to destroy her. Ridley had killed her first parents and destroyed her entire home colony. But then decades had passed That hatred was not gone, but time and repeated executions had worn down the edges. It was no longer fire, it was just a verdict. Ridley would die, nothing fancier than that. But other things could be more urgent.

Samus lowered her weapon. The Pirate commander could be second on the kill list. However, she was not going to give this monster the pleasure of saying it.

Ridley understood anyway. He tilted his head back, exposing his fangs as he laughed. "Ragh, ragh! You are intelligent. That is good. You will not kill me now, as you wish my forces to fight the Chozo's. Kin to kill kin, it is good for you. For now, I assent. Go on your way. Enter the temple and hunt our enemy with my cooperation."

He beat his wings as he jumped up, getting extra height as he sailed over her towards the exit. Samus let the dust swirl around her and watched his blip on her sensor readout, but did not turn. Then Ridley landed a dozen yards behind her, claws scratching on the ground.

"Oh, I remember. You must still wish to free the human child. The speaker on the radio. Well, I have something to show you."

The click of a latch sounded through the chamber. Ridley lifted something out of his equipment cask. Then he said, "You were late."

And a little human voice repeated, "You were late."

Samus turned and looked back to see the thing Ridley held in his hand. Her suit scans had rated Roger's transmissions as authentic. However, sound analysis only told her that those words came from a human mouth. The mouth was intact. Above the nose and below the vocal cords, Ridley had not needed the rest.

Little plastic bellows worked to provide the necessary air and a computer uplink controlled the muscle nerves. Three pounds of organics in an artificial housing.

Ridley watched her and his lips curled up exposing every one of his hundred teeth in a monstrous grin. "The sight of you is truly pleasurable. I regret now that I performed the excision so quickly. If I could have killed the child right now in front of you I would know ecstasy. An intelligent enemy is an excellent thing. I can torment you, and you will do nothing because it does not change the necessity of our alliance. You hate me but you will not kill me here."

Beyond perception, the universe chilled around Samus. Time and probability crystalized with like ice, ripping and tearing the softer stuff. Possibilities were clear, as well as their consequences.

Ridley breathed heavily. "I know your thoughts. That harm is not kill. That I can command my forces as well with fewer limbs. However, we both know there are hunting metroids out there. If you wound me now I will likely be consumed on my return journey. So, you must do nothing."

Samus had not lifted her weapon. She stood beside the half ruined statue, looking back at Ridley backlit by the distant sunbathed end of the tunnel.

Ridley's tongue snaked around his fangs. "Your eyes. There is no fear, only still and unbendable fury. It is beautiful. Goodbye, Samas Aran. I will see you again."

Then he turned and flew off down the tunnel and out of sight.

Samus breathed deeply. Then she slowly turned and walked forward. The supposedly sealed temple door slid open for her, inviting her into the dark abyss within.

...

(Author's Note: And comment or input is greatly appreciated. Hearing feedback from people is the whole reason I post online.)


	16. Halls of the Dead

Chapter 16

Halls of the Dead

...

Samus walked into the Temple of the Hunter, her footsteps echoing off the cold stones. Soon she left behind the cavelike gloom of the entrance gate, and stepped into a dim yellow light filtering from unseen sources. The tall door remained open behind her, letting through the faint sound of wind and the distant swish of Ridley's wings in the tunnel. The murderer flew away, winging slowly towards his future death like so many others of his identical kind. After killing him again and again, over the year Samus had let herself grow weary of his monstrosity. However, she had to admit this particular example had managed to light those flames anew.

This temple passage was narrow but absurdly high ceilinged. The walls were painted and carved with ancient Chozo, bowing with palms spread in greeting. Between them the engraved words called out praise for the innovation and industry that took place here. They promised it would continue for ten million years. According to Samus' estimation they had missed their mark by 9.8 million.

Even before the Chozo discovered immortality they had been a cocky bunch. At the height of the Empire, augmentation technologies already meant that five hundred years of life was not unheard of. And unlike some of the galaxies more natural methuselahs, it was not the sessile existence of a glacial metabolism, but centuries of life brimming with incredible activity. By their biology Chozo loved motion, a constant change in activity or thought. Untamed by philosophy, that nature filled them with an incredible drive for greatness.

Any type of greatness.

A touch to her helmet and the next door lock slid open. Samus walked though into a circular chamber, marked on the floor with stripes of dim green illumination that rippled gently. With the black roof above, the dark room felt like being upside-down underwater. A single slab of stone stood in the center and there was a door behind it but still Samus looked around to glare at the round room's lack of corners. She had long since learned to distrust places that seemed simple.

Nothing attacked her immediately, and if there was anything invisible then it was cloaked from infra-red as well. She cautiously walked up the standing slab, covered in shimmering Chozo writing. Her visor scanned and recorded it for later, but Samus doubted she would need to refer to it. These words stuck in her memory.

" _We set this here for those we leave behind; the monsters and the fearful. Those who built this place are already gone and we tarry but a moment later. We will not say why. Our reasons are useless to you, leaving only our greed for endless light. Forgive us for what we did to you._ "

A single line lay at the bottom of the plaque, almost a postscript.

" _The door is still open_."

Samus felt her breath rise in her chest. This message was only decades old, dating to the Chozo abandonment. In that it was alone, a fresh monument placed in an ancient room. To any non-chozo who had studied the language, that cryptic message would have been fascinating enough. However, Samus saw something else. The precise shape and serifs of the "you" glyph; it was singular, and it was personal. The writer knew the person they were speaking to. The path had shown them someone likely to read it, and if Samus was right in noticing the trends of the last few days then there were two prime suspects. She was only one of them.

A query to the downloaded Federation database instantly gave the answer what she was looking for. There were three of these plaques, all identical and originally placed in each of the three main entrances to the temple, though the one at the front door had been removed by human researchers. Samus' database search also revealed a series of suit alerts she was not looking for. They came from within the partitioned section of the suit systems. It seemed "Adam" had something to say.

Samus eyed the notifications in the corner of her view. Looking at the timestamps, they matched up with her entering the temple and the message slab coming into view. That narrowed down her list of possible explanations for the 'Adam' malfunction. The probability of a virus implanted by the Federation plummeted as those triggers would make no sense. It all could be an artifact of Samus abruptly halting Adam' download at 52%, or the Last could have left a hidden packet of malicious code in the Pirate command ship computers, hoping for some contact with other living Chozo rescuers. That option was possible and almost preferable. The alternative was...deeper.

This suit was a gift from the high temple in Zebes, long decades ago. Even though it had been torn apart and rebuilt so many times since then, the core remained the same, one set down before she was even born. Samus knew that the science of prophecy was generally concerned with more statistical probabilities and by necessity got more uncertain the farther from the origin it looked. However, in any pattern there are sometimes islands of clarity, instances far in the future where known factors will inevitably collide in predictable ways. Discovering those islands was the mastery of the Chozo.

The first suit glitch had been when she looked on this planet with her own eyes. At this point Samus would have much preferred if Nakamura messed with Adam during the trial. That would be better than having to contend against yet another faction, long dead Chozo reaching out from the throughs of deep prophecy. It was much harder to shoot enemies who refused to reside in the same era of time.

After a brief moment's pause, Samus cued up the message from 'Adam'.

" _(Definition) Monsters: dangerous or cruel creatures; creatures that did not arise from natural evolution; creatures of exceptional size or power._ "

Samus gave a mental sigh. Thank you, Adam-Thing.

" _I said exceptional_. _Do not instill your own emotion on unliving words._ "

She stopped, then continued to walk. There were really too many people telling her what to think right now.

Samus stepped though the far doorway in this same dark mood and so was almost blinded by a flash of light. Her weapon rose and fired a smoking shot before she realized that she had just walked into the middle of a holographic display. A step backwards revealed glowing Chozo letters hovering in the air

" _Have patience for the welcome._ "

Samus frowned. It was not that she expected Chozo messages to be perfectly intelligible, but this holographic blurb lacked the florid wording and gravitas that usually provoked the confusion. By Chozo standards it was brusk and infuriatingly ungrammatical.

After a few seconds the floating words withdrew, sliding backwards through the air into the room. Samus cautiously followed at its slow walking pace, keeping a close eye on the walls and corners. There were power sources behind the walls and ceiling, operating the holographic emitters and some other technologies, but nothing immediately presented itself. Samus was simply experiencing a tour down a long featureless corridor of metamorphic stone guided by a bit of odd grammar.

It was possible that the architects intended there to be living personnel on staff here to provide the expected welcoming committee. Samus could not immediately figure out any other use for this corridor. As it was, there was only fire-hardened rock and a few decorative metal panels on the walls.

Then, half way down the wall the floating words stopped and blinked into a new configuration.

" _Scan Complete_ "

Samus immediately had new ideas of what this corridor could be for.

" _Weapon authorization recognized_ "

She breathed out again. Her parents' gift had helped once again. At least the temple's remaining systems recognized their own.

" _Biological contamination detected. Have patience for incineration_."

And they expected only Chozo to be wearing it. Chozo scans saw through a Chozo suit to the decidedly Earthish cells that still constituted the vast majority of Samus Aran. She sighed. Just once it would be nice for some group to not regard her as alien.

Even a brief moment later, room was already incredibly hot. The metal panels on the walls glowed red on their way to orange as the hidden emitters bombarded the room with cooking heat. Samus dashed on to the far end of the hall but as she expected the door there was shut, refusing to open to scan, blaster, or repeated punching.

A little icon in the corner of her visor began to display the suit's growing concern about the outside temperature. In its current state Samus would not survive much more of this escalation.

So Samus decided to return to the middle of the corridor and wait patiently. The metal wall panels were now glowing bright white with terrible heat. Any contamination hitching a ride on the outside of a Chozo battle suit would have long since been burnt away, so the question was what the security program would do now that it still detected pesky human cells. Samus was banking on the Chozo flair for the dramatic. The suit's interior temperature was now one hundred and fifty degrees. A standard human would have already been dead.

Then the metal wall panels slid open and massive jets of fire blasted into the room. Perfect.

Samus bolted forward, plunging down the throat of the inferno. The suit screamed its warning as shield battery levels dropped off a cliff, and even the ice beam blast she fired off barely lessened the roaring conflagration that continued to beat against her. But then she reached the heart and her gauntlet punched into the guts of the flaming machinery.

Her hand drew back, already shimmering with light. Any decontamination equipment that dealt out this level of heat had to have the systems necessary to operate in those same conditions. Now Samus' suit was eating its fill.

New words flashed in her visor. " _Varia system restored_ "

Suit energy stores dropped again, but now for a happier reason. Finally provided with the raw ingredients, bits of Samus' armor began to glow and rearrange. Her flaring shoulder pauldrons expanded, creating a housing for the new systems being assembled. Samus planted her back against the wall panel to keep it from closing as she smashed her weapon into the machinery again and again, shattering the innards into pieces small enough for the gun barrel to draw in as raw material.

Her shield levels stabilized, fortunately just shy of allowing her flesh to cook off her bones. The room took exception to this, causing more panels to draw back and deploy large mechanical arms tipped with flamethrowers. They undulated like hungry dragons, bathing the stone around Samus with an unending blast of fire until the metamorphic rocks lost their sheen when even crystals formed deep in the planet's began to soften. The somehow, the flamethrowers made a musical roar like battling orchestras.

Sometimes you had to love the Chozo.

One fight later, a severed mechanical arm proved to be an adequate way to pry open the far security door, so Samus left it wedged in place as she squeezed through the gap, leaving behind a floating holographic message cheerfully thanking her for her patience with decontamination procedures. Now inside the temple proper, the rooms became more functional, at least by Chozo standards. Branching hallways led off into the gloom towards what looked like ancient scientific chambers, but Samus continued to follow the main thoroughfare. She was willing to guess that whatever the Last was heading towards would be in a more important location.

A few moldering power cells gave up their charge to fuel the suit but other than that the walk was quiet. Then Samus stepped through an archway and found herself at an intersection with a massive cavernous hallway whose ceiling vanished up into the blue tinted gloom. Every foot of those seemingly infinite walls was filled with carved alcoves, each housing the life-sized shape of a Chozo frozen forever in sculpted time. Samus walked forward and ten thousand artificial eyes looked down at her.

These were simple stone carvings, not the animate guardian statues like the one Ridley had slain outside, but Samus still moved cautiously. As she took a few more steps into the chasm it became clear that there were spaces in the alcoves behind each statue, a gap large enough for a humanoid to hide. There were thousands of those hiding places on each wall.

The Last's troop of pirate cultists had been in the temple for hours. Samus sighed as she realized this hall was a sniper-alley good enough to inspire a religion. Well, the fact that she was not shot already suggested they had not reached here yet. Fifty yards to her right the floor rose up twenty feet to a new shelf while in the opposite direction it sank to the same degree, the high ceiling unchanged. This whole chamber was like a staircase for giants, between walls of the unmoving watchers.

Suit scan did not pick up any life signs hidden in the innumerable nooks, but Samus had learned not to trust that decades ago. She advanced into the hall with weapon raised, edging around to inspect the alcove behind the nearest statue. Then she lowered her arm as she realized there actually was someone there. A pile of chozo bones lay carefully stacked in their place of rest.

This was a crypt.

For a long moment Samus stood there in silence. The bones were lined with faint patterns in crystal and metal, a spiderweb lattice, the remaining evidence of the augmentations that had served their owner when she lived. Samus supposed her own bones must look like that now, though she doubted there would be anyone to stack them neatly when she fell. She could see enough of her future to guess that.

She stepped back into the chasm hallway and faced the statue as suit scan returned a name from the inscription.

" _Kektothiocin Sound Weaver_ "

Then it returned another and another.

" _Atrotiack of a Valliant Heart. Thutriakinial Deep Delver. Zachojin the Spire of Stars, Duzotak Well-feathered Rearer, Tuilonatin..._ " on and on as names filled Samus' eyes in an endless stream. It was blinding, these waiting dead.

For they were waiting. The stepped floor of this hall was not empty, but was scatted with the tool stations of a craftsman's workshop rising out the grooved metal patterns tranced in the floor. The stations were simple but not crude, the tools of a craftsman who worked in artisanal superconductors and hand-forged uranium. Samus traces the fingers of her gauntlet across the edge of one station. It was still set for easy start up, as if the owners had simply walked away for an evening. Around her the silence of the shadows grew louder.

Then she walked towards the edge of the platform where the floor dropped to its next great shelf and she saw one bench down there that still had a product sitting on it, unfinished. It was a dark metal hand, long fingered and sharp. From its wrist glittering bones emerged. Samus recognized that sheath, ones like it had alternately saved her or tried to kill her. This was a holy location, this place made guardian statues.

Hidden to the side was another inscription, dedicating this chamber. " _We who are dead gift our flesh to the Boneshapers. Though absent, we strike forth to defend our pasts against all yet to come. Those who disturb this rest shall know our wrath, unfettered and raw._ "

A soft sound echoed through the hall. It was the muffled patter of footsteps. Then suit scan picked up life energy readings, far down the descending crypt stairs. There were a lot of them, and this deep into the temple Samus was willing to guess that it had to be The Last's Pirate worshipers. Ridley's forces would not have had the time to move so far, and the metroids didn't have feet. Samus moved towards the signatures, armor barely making a sound against the stone.

A Chozo voice drifted up from far below. "Idiots, I ordered you not to touch anything."

An answer in Utgardian came from a Pirate voice, absurdly apologetic.

The Last was not impressed. "No you useless thing, stand up and stop bowing! What? No, don't cut off your hand, how did your pitiful species ever survive to achieve space travel?"

It seemed The Last had upgraded the language translation systems of his followers, although it was probably more for his own convenience than out of a desire to share knowledge. It was reassuring that the cult of chozo-worshipers unsettled The Last as much as they had Samus. In her line of work it was easy to lose track of what sanity was supposed to be. On the other hand, the Last was a scientist who had been imprisoned as a dangerous criminal and so was perhaps not the best baseline to judge from.

Samus silently jumped down to the next level, an area filled with statue limbs and made her way over to look down from where this floor dropped down to the next step of the tomb-stairs. The Last's forces were still further down, probably on two levels away, but it seemed they were getting closer. Samus noted the half constructed statues covering that next stage of the Boneshapers' workshop and quietly moved to get in position for a new plan.

Two Pirate soldiers peaked up over the edge of that level in unison, beam weapons trained as they clung to the wall beneath them. They saw nothing, and so clicked their report as they jumped up and got into formation with their weapons trained outwards. More Pirates followed, forming up into a v-shape as they glared at the statue alcoves with intense suspicion. Then The Last rose up on the side of the platform, being the only one to have actually used the narrow stone staircase carved into the step wall for that purpose. His long robes trailed against the floor.

More sounds from below indicated that a large squad of Pirates was following behind but the honor guard advanced ahead of their commander, god, or prophet. They looked at a half-finished Chozo guardian statue that stood in the center of the space with visible relief at its missing head and shoulders. Across the galaxy, many species had learned the power of guardian statues in decidedly practical demonstrations. Even incomplete, the Pirates seemed unsettled by the pale organic bones that protruded from the places were the statue metal had not been added. They followed a new leader, but these soldiers still feared the wrath of the Chozo.

Then the lead-most took one more step and saw what had been standing in the perfect silhouette behind that incomplete statue. Samus' shot took him in the mouth from three feet away.

The Hall of the Boneshapers exploded into chaos and actual explosions. The Pirate soldiers tried to form up but Samus was already among them. The Pirates' lack of empathy now worked to her advantage as they did not instinctively lay off their triggers and the crossfire wore down at their own sides' armor. She ignored most of them and darted towards her actual target, but The Last reacted instantly and flung himself backwards into the void he had just climbed up.

Samus gritted her teeth as she followed with her own leap and met the expected hail of blaster-fire from rising below. She landed with a crash, maneuvering jets guiding her right onto the head of a Pirate trying to duck behind a craft station. Its carapace cracked with a crunch.

Samus queued up an open channel and began to speak in Chozo, "You interrupted our last conversation."

Blasters and missiles rained down on her position. From behind behind the firing line came The Last's voice, not even slightly out of breath. "You should be dead, experiencing the life energy field at such close range. Your biology has been modified more than these fool's files suggested."

Samus leaned out of cover and fired off a missile but The Last had changed trajectory the instant he finished talking, ducking among the Pirates to mask his life signature. Samus raced over to a statue alcove in the wall for new cover.

The Last continued to calmly analyze the situation, "You entered through the tertiary entrance, despite the active security and the Utgardians' own efforts. According to their coded transmissions, Commander Ridley advanced towards that location, so you either killed him or allied with him. Given the data on your history, killing is most probable. Such a rage filled thing you are."

He was trying to force her into the thoughts he desired. It was a battle of words in the middle of the Path. However, two could play at that game and by now she had a chance to analyze the data she had been given. Samus never liked talking in a fight but sometimes it was necessary.

She fired a blaster volley as she said, "You were imprisoned in the late days of the empire. Put away until a time where your crime would no longer be dangerous. Now you are trying to assemble the image of a galaxy one thousand years later from scraps of information. You led the Pirates back here to your former work site, desperate for any familiarity. I can still help you."

"You are a worm that thinks it can see."

That gave Samus the triangulation she needed, charged beam shot hit the last known location dead on. That took a Pirate soldier in the chest as the Last danced away in a blur.

The Last moved faster than even the armored Pirates. Samus narrowed her eyes. Suit scan bit through him easily, showing a full set of Late Imperial enhancements. Even Old Bird had not been outfitted with many of those features, and those he held had been set in a tired and time-worn frame. The Last was in his prime and hailed from another era, one where the Chozo had exulted in expressions of their unquestionable superiority.

But Samus wore a battle-suit. She sprang forth again and continued to unleash hell.

She said, "I will discard your attempt to kill me if you pause in your race for this temple's secret.

The Last hissed, "You do not know what this place is for."

Samus slid to the side, skidding in a spin as she fired with expert precision. "Enlighten me."

The Last took a single smooth step and a Pirate received the blast meant for his chest. "Ah, so you have suspicions. You believe this was the last planet inhabited by my people before they vanished from the knowledge of this galactic population. You think this place holds the answer: why."

Three missiles cut off his paths so he was forced to leap up a considerable hight and bound off a bit of projecting stone to land in the shelter of a statue alcove. An energy shot scorched the wall and the edge of his vanishing robe as he ducked behind the statue.

His voice continued, "But these creatures with me have suspicions as well. They tell me a story. A story of how a glorious people became pitiful hermits and then retreated entirely. The story says they turned into light."

Samus turned her attention to taking down two Pirate soldiers, but still noticed as a long fingered hand snaked out from behind the statue to grab and yank back a passing Pirate. The Pirate's look of rapture at this touch was short lived, to judge by the screams and crunching squelches that came from that alcove. Samus finished plastering her current opponent across the floor and turned to dash towards the Last just as a small jury rigged mechanism skidded out from the alcove, trailing green ichor across the floor. Pirates cybernetically integrated so much of their equipment, parts extraction could be messy.

The device began to hum as Samus spun around, shooting out a grapple beam to yank herself away faster. The device's hum reached a crescendo and a sparking energy field surged out, sweeping past Pirates who suddenly felt their cybernetic implants twitch and seize uncontrollably. Samus swept around a corner and only caught the edge of the blast but she still felt the suit struggle, disrupted somehow at the hardware level.

The Last's voice came again, but now from ten different directions. By now his breath was coming heavily, one step shy of panting. "They have stories about you as well. The lone pretender to the Chozo throne. No wonder such low things saw a god."

He had set every Pirate's implants to broadcast as relay speakers, hiding his true location. They were living speakers, though the vibration to their carapaces had to be uncomfortable. That meant slower reflexes and in one particular example, a charged beam shot delivered through his armpit joint. Samus straightened up in her latest alcove and scanned the battlefield.

She said, "They saw a punishment. There is a difference."

"Indeed there is."

Samus dashed across the open space, glancing for clues. Energy beams burned against her shields as she slid into cover, even as her suppressing fire hit back. Pirate soldiers were sill dangerous, and nothing to completely ignore.

The Last liked to talk. Those kinds of adversaries were always nice. Left in silence, he instead said, "Gods. Justice. Different stages of civilization articulating the same primitive sensation of guilt. But beyond that superstition, there is only cause and effect. There is discovery and exploitation. And here I shall at last feast on the fruits of my discovery."

Samus let her disappointment show. "A looter, like all the others."

Now there was true anger in his voice, "I steal nothing. The treasure this planet holds is fungible; receiving my reward does not lessen that of those hypocrites who built it on my back. After all, they are the ones who left you. I only seek to follow them to apotheosis."

Samus' breath froze. Apotheosis. Ascension to a new level of being. That was secret exit of the Chozo, the reason for their disappearance. That was the temple's secret.

That was what the message had said. " _The door is still open._ "

...


	17. Living Skin

Chapter 17

Living Skin

...

Samus stumbled at the realization of this temple's true purpose. Shock dulled her reaction time and an explosion threw her back, shields beeping in protest. Pirate soldiers poured blaster fire down on her position and she just barely got back into cover. However, The Last seemed to have forgotten that a battle was underway. He lectured from his hiding place.

"You cannot imagine my sorrow, when I awoke from that deathlike pause to learn that my people were gone. It was terrifying to think that some foe had broken our prophecy, shattered the Path in order to undo what could not be undone. But then I learned the truth, that my kin had done it to themselves. They who had imprisoned me for my work had built upon it until they could abandon not only me but this entire galaxy. You cannot imagine my anger."

A dark bipedal shape soared away through the air and Samus followed, springing down to the next lower level. The workshop here was less cluttered, and focused on a sole target. A full guardian statue stood in the center, a black metal Chozo mirroring the feathered one that now stood beside it. The Last's eyes squinted in triumph as a squad of fresh pirates formed up on each side of the room, weapons trained on Samus.

"But I shall let you experience a taste of that fury." He turned to the statue. "Perimeter breach. Alien threat in possession of stolen military hardware. Purify the sanctum."

The statue's eyes glowed red. Its fingers clicked as the joints jerkily twitched into motion, but there was already an incredible power within. Samus had fought such things before, terrible protectors, placed at geographic branches in time to close off a certain avenue of possibility. In the past, they had nearly killed her, with or without her suit. However, she had grown since then.

The watching Pirates cheered and howled as they saw the fearsome bounty hunter fall to her knees before the slowly advancing statue. However, The Last instead frowned. His foot slid back against the dusty floor, repelled by a new wave of uncertainty. Samus planted her fist on the ground, one knee bent as she lowered her head to the guardian statue.

Her Chozo parents had taught her that in any being there were many lifetimes; divisions where you could look back in time and see a stranger in your skin. Species were the same way on a grander scale, and any sensible Chozo would know that. The Last was consumed by his fury, and thus blinded to the reasons that shaped the people in the millennia after his imprisonment. But he was not the only Chozo in the room, and Samus trusted the Boneshaper would have realized that.

"You who are dead, hear my heart."

The guardian statue raised its huge hand, ready to send it cleaving down through her skull. Samus focused her mind. In a body, matter produced life, life rose to thought, and by the ancient secret, thought produced energy. Energy could be sensed, and Samus' was not alien. This was the true irony, that the _Heart of the Chozo_ would manage to surprise the scientist who discovered it.

The statue froze. Then it lowered its hand. There was a reason the statues were made with the honored dead. For true permanence, you wanted a system to have some discretion. Samus rose to her feet beside the statue, looking back at the Last whose face was contorted by horror and disgust. Then the statue twisted to the side, red eyes focused instead on the squads of Pirate soldiers. They had just reached the next tier of its priority list.

One of the Pirates sadly clicked its pincher.

Samus sprang forward as the statue dragged its hand through the floor, ripping through solid stone like water as it flung the shrapnel at the Pirates. Screams and shrieks erupted along with blaster fire but Samus did not bother watching, instead focusing only on her target. The Last dodged back, leaping around to keep the guardian statue between Samus and himself. It was a strange dance they fell into, since the guardian refused to harm either Samus or the Last and yet was still very intent on tearing the pirate soldiers apart. Blaster fire rained down on it only to splash off its dark metal.

All Samus needed was one good shot, and soon enough her blaster grazed The Last's arm, throwing out a spray of blood. The Last screamed but stuck a hand inside his robe and pulled out three vials bundled together. Then he smashed them against the statue and everything vanished into a roiling cloud of smoke. He was trying to run, but Samus simply raised a hand to her temple, switching to infrared sight. She spotted the yellow blotch moving away and took aim, however at that moment her world chose to erupt into fire for the third time that day.

The black cloud had ignited, and though Samus' newly repaired varia system dealt with the heat easily it meant she was blind for a crucial few seconds. When the firestorm cleared, the Last was gone and the last few pirate soldiers were darting out a doorway, fleeing from the Hall of the Boneshapers. Samus was left alone with the guardian statue. Its red eyes watched the pirates' escape path but it did not follow. Such creations were meant to guard a single place, dissuasion did not require pursuit. However, this time Samus detected something else, the slightest shadow of frustration in that expressionless graven face.

She moved to run after the Pirates, but before she took more than a few steps she turned back to look at that silent watcher, destined to stand in this hall until the planet crumbled. Samus bowed her head to it. Then she spun around but as she did so there was a loud crack that rang out behind her. The guardian statue had reached up its large hands and with casual force split open its own head. Inside was a solid block of technology, glimmering with crystalline webs and shining metal muscles, and the center the barely visible bone of a chozo skull. The statue knelt down and Samus reached out to place her gauntlet in the wound. Light shimmered as the suit consumed the offering.

" _Friction Modulators Restored_ "

It was the system that allowed the statues to strike with such incredible force without sliding backwards. Traditionally Samus had used her own to jump off walls. The Last was getting farther by the second and even this offense against Newtonian physics was unlikely to help. But the dead had offered it and so Samus bowed again. The statue did not move. As she stood up, Samus trialed the fingers of her gauntlet through the drops of chozo blood The Last had left on the floor. The suit quietly began sequencing the genetics but she dismissed the results. Then Samus turned and walked out of the hall, leaving the countless dead to their watchful slumber.

The Pirates' trail was not hard to follow. Several of them had been wounded and despite their cybernetic trauma kits still left faint trails of ichor droplets. One of them must have figured that out, because at the next intersection of corridors two Pirate bodies lay slumped against the wall, half melted by blaster burns. It was classic Pirate mentality: identify the problem, then eliminate it. However, the air in this deep section of the temple was incredibly still, which meant ionized particles lingered, tracing back blaster paths to the particular corridor where the firing squad had been standing. Samus turned and followed down that trail.

As she jogged after them, Samus noticed a change in the temple architecture around her. As she moved to this new area, the design aesthetic had altered in a subtle way that would be invisible to a foreigner. If the previous section had been dedicated to knowledge and preservation, then here the energy was turned more outwards. The engravings flared and the columns were thicker, sturdier and more angular.

Then she turned a corner in the corridors and saw that its exit was surrounded by the remains of a heavy duty shield generator, still clouded with the mist of discharged energy meant to supply its operation for a thousand years. The Last had not been patient, and unlike in the rest of the temple his ancient knowledge did not serve to pave his road. The Chozo imperial military tended to change their security codes more frequently than that.

Samus flicked her eyes up to the suit displays projected across her visor. Her shield levels were starting to get low, several of those Pirate soldiers had been good shots. However, missile seed ammunition was still plentiful. She could work with that.

A few moments later, a charged super missile streaked through the doorway to explode against the floor a few steps inside the next chamber. The shock wave should deal with any ambush immediately inside and even Pirate eyes needed a second to adjust to that blinding flare so Samus was inside the room within the instant, almost riding the explosion as she jumped back to land on the wall above the door. She perched there for a brief second, newly acquired friction systems allowing the metal skin of her suit to stick on polished stone. From there she beheld the bad news.

This room was an armory. The huge round chamber stretched out in front of her, capped by a vaulted dome over green shaded walls covered with technology. All around this expanse, Pirate soldiers scattered for cover. They were right to, because Samus was hunting them once again. With a blast of suit jets, she charged.

One Pirate, braver than the rest, instead of scrambling for cover ran the other direction. He reached the wall and a great, long barreled Chozo weapon that hung there. He grabbed it and tugged it free, arms trembling as he struggled to lift it. Despite its great weight, he managed to turn and aim the barrel, every fiber of his effort focused on holding it steady. Samus emerged within his sights, clear across an empty room with no cover in sight. The Pirate grinned, an expression which faded as he noticed Samus made no effort to alter her charge in light of this new development.

His weapon trigger depressed with a sad click and useless silence. The Chozo did not like other species playing with their toys.

Samus slid to a halt through the shower of smoking exoskeleton shards, turning to survey the rest of the room. Then she finally found the Last. He was at the far wall, crouched down beside a bulging table of some control mechanism. There was an empty pedestal in front of him that appeared to be hooked up to some sort of retrieval system for the many weapons across the room. Samus did not take the time to scan it, she already knew she had to stop him.

The Last shouted out, "Soldiers, die for your angels!"

A group of pirates ran to oblige him, shielding the Chozo with their bodies as Samus' attacks hammered against them. Then she changed tactics, aiming her missile blasts to their side to simply blow them out of the way instead of wearing down all their shields. In fact, it worked better than she had expected, many of them must have already been very weak, since even with a glancing impact several of the pirates hit the ground and flopped limply where they fell.

Samus had her firing line, but it was too late. The Last stepped up onto the pedestal and the air around him began to shimmer, the sign of things hidden behind the world. Really, Samus should have known. There was only one weapon a person like him would have come here to get. She fired again and again, but the armory machine blocked all her attacks, refusing to let anything interfere with this nearly sacred acquisition. Then the light faded and the Last stood on the pedestal once more, clad in a Chozo battle-suit.

He raised his right arm, marveling at the sleek weapon barrel that encompassed his long forearm. The shoulders bulged up on each side of his head just as they did on Samus. Then he turned to her, eyes only just barely visible through the V-shaped slit of the helmet visor.

"Now the contest truly begins."

Samus ran through the temple, dodging blasts by instinct honed through decades of combat. What she could not avoid was the idea that she was being herded. It could hardly be helped, Aurora had provided her a map of the temple complex but all the Federation's work had still half the rooms were labeled with question marks. The Last had lived here. This was his home.

Well, there were a few things that had changed since then so Samus tried to head up, choosing each passage and shaft that led closer to the plateau surface above. Aurora's map indicated that there were a few places up there where the temple structures poked free of the surrounding rock.

Her shields screamed as a glancing hit clipped her. A wave beam blast cut the corner, reaching through solid rock to materialize on the far side and predict Samus' movement. The Last may not have been a warrior by trade but that suit was the essence of war. In her current state, it was certainly made up the difference in skill.

The Last vaulted up out of a shaft and so encountered a precisely timed super missile to the face. That threw him back and bought Samus a few precious seconds to reach her destination. Her best hope was to use the Last's lack of experience against him and hope that the Federation scientists' label on the temple map of " _Possible High Energy Communications Array_ " was accurate.

As she darted through a final door, pauldrons scraping the edges as it struggled to open in time, Samus was suddenly confronted by sunlight. From high above, shafts of light stabbed down through windows sealed against a frigid atmosphere that would be unpleasant even for a Chozo. Outside, the high plateau above the canyons stretched out in each direction, bare lifeless rock waiting on the slopes of the great ancient volcanoes. From higher up the closest peak, the massive Chozo statue still looked down at them, jutting from the living mountain.

The large octagonal chamber was dominated by a huge central pillar of machinery that looked like much larger device which had been crushed down until it telescoped. The room was scattered with pieces of remaining Federation research tech and Samus touched her helmet's temple, initiating the scan to grab whatever they had learned.

Samus had just begun her coded transmission when the outer door exploded, and through the dust and smoke walked The Last's gleaming armor. He vanished from sight as Samus ducked around to the other side of the central pillar but his voice continued over the radio waves.

"Such a sad imitation you are, trying to ape my people through the cloud of ignorance. You are lost in this place. You can't even recognize the wonder when you see it."

There was a tone of rapture in his voice, an artist standing before a masterwork. In that breath, Samus could see his mind clearly and burning energy began to charge up in the barrel of her gun. Then she sprang around the pillar, firing the blast before even her eyes could register what she saw. But the Last was exactly where she predicted, standing at the pillar's control panel, one hand stretched out to touch it.

Samus allowed herself a smile as the full power shot hit him directly in the head. Even through the suit shields, that impact world set his brain ringing and fuzz his thoughts for a precious second before his implants took over. And all the while, Samus's scan continued to transmit a string of numbers with one particular set of ears in mind.

The Last stumbled back from the hit, off his balance, and Samus was already charging the next attack. However, even as he reeled The Last made no effort at counter attack and continued to talk as if nothing had just happened. "It is honestly amusing, to see you try to fight me here. This facility is mine. Even after my capture, they could not help but make it a temple to my work."

Samus noticed that the lights on the control panel had changed color. The Last had done something there. Well, first things first. She shot him in the head again.

The Last straightened up in his armor, not trying to block or dodge this time either, merely accepting the hit. But as the blast erupted from Samus' weapon, the air between them glowed. Ribbons of shimmering light grasped at the blaster shot in mid air and tore it to pieces bit by bit. By the time it reached the Last, his helmet was merely brushed by warm air.

Suddenly the chamber shuddered as vast systems grumbled back into operation. Dust fell from the roof as the room itself began to grind upwards, up into the light above the surface. In the center, the pillar of machinery began to slowly unfurl and grow.

The Last gestured with his gauntlet. "Thank you for allowing me to calibrate the device. I am afraid I would not have been able to attack until you did so, or my weapon would have been blacklisted as well. This facility is dedicated to understanding energy, and I am its master. Why do you think I led you here to the spire?" He raised his weapon as he walked back towards the control panel. "And cease that pointless broadcast of what I assume are our coordinates. You know now that this is not a communication array."

Samus shrugged. "No. But the humans thought it was. So they brought their own to check."

The Last whipped around to look at the blinking lights across the scattered Federation equipment, particularly the tall blue and white spike that was now clearly a high energy transmitter. Then Samus' suit crackled with the faint sound of an established communications channel.

Nakamura's voice was filled with static but growing clearer by the second. "Coordinates received, Aran. Diomedes orbiting into position."

The Last turned on Samus, his eyes narrowing behind the suit visor. "You called in an orbital strike on your own position."

His foot slid back across the stone but Samus was already moving. A crackling whip of blue energy sprang from the back of her gauntlet arced to fasten onto the Last's suit. It seemed she had been right, this new protective system did not consider a grapple to be harmful, or it fell under the high energy threshold. Burning light built up in the Last's weapon but Samus was suddenly at point blank range. Even if she had to fight hand to hand, he would not escape.

The Last fought back against blow after blow, struggling to fend her off. And all the while, Nakamura's voice came back to echo across the radio spectrum. "Samus, I... The forces I deployed on the planet are terrible, but they were a last resort. You know full well, sometimes friendly fire is unavoidable when you must stop an infection. After all, you did the same on the BSL. Please, understand. Sometimes there is no way to win, only to control your losses."

The shafts of sunlight grew and stretched as the spire chamber continued to rumble up higher, unfolding into full operation, a tower above the hidden temple. All through it, two battle-suits were locked in combat. The Last might have known technology, but he was not practiced at fighting hand to hand against an expert opponent. Even with his suit systems at full power his breath was elevated the next time he spoke to Samus.

"Disappointing. Despite everything you have seen, despite all your posturing, your blood still compels you to trust the other humans. Well, let us put that to the test. They have just given me enough information to see the path."

A screech of feedback rang through Samus' ears as the Last tapped the side of his helmet. Then he flung her back across the room but no follow-up strike came after. He was only looking at the Federation communications spike. Samus launched her own scan assault but the Last knew the programs better, he had seized control of the transmission channel. She readied her suit grapple again case he tried to flee the room now that she could not retarget the orbital strike but now the Last seemed content to completely ignore Samus. He looked upwards at the chamber's rising ceiling, turning off towards the horizon where Diomedes was rising up behind the blue sky.

"Human ship Diomedes, I present to you an alternative."

Samus was locked out of the transmitter, but the Last kindly let her hear the entire conversation. In return she tried a firing a missile barrage at him but the missile seed's energy sheath was apparently similar enough to trip the spire's detectors. Shimmering ribbons of light tore the projectiles apart in mid air.

The Last was using a variant on the Pirate translation software to transform his words to human standard. However, in tweaking the settings to more echo his natural voice it transformed the synthetic human pronunciation to something hideous, groaning and whistling all at once. "I am the last true master of this planet, and as such I offer you terms. You do not wish the other species to share in your looting, and I am willing to accept that. I even respect your commitment, your willingness to release the artificial lifeforms dubbed Metroids. Make no hostile action against me and I promise I will make none against you, nor remove any technology from this place. I will join you in exterminating the other forces and then depart, leaving you the planet. To indicate acceptance, transmit to me your full files on the hybrid called Samus Aran."

There was a stretching moment of silence, filled only with the grumbling mechanisms of the still rising spire chamber. The Last turned back towards Samus, gloating in his certainty. Then the Diomedes transmission returned.

A soft but strong female voice said, "What did you do to Ms Aran?"

The Last's confidence slipped as Samus let her smile flicker onto her face. His speech, designed to bring Nakamura to his side, had not been calibrated for GF Officer Yin. When Samus had coded her redirect prank, she had not felt any need to identify her transmissions beyond 'Chozo battle-suit origin'. Samus had decided not to warn the Last about that.

Then Nakamura broke back onto the channel. He was panting, as well he might. A member of his crew had just found out he loosed the metroids on Federation citizens. "Unidentified Chozo individual, this is Federation Commander Nakamura. Your terms are acceptable. Samus Aran, cease hostilities and stand by his side in the rising tower. I know how much you trust me." He sounded defeated.

The Last said, "The optimal decision from your perspective. It is refreshing to find a primitive species behaving logically."

Samus had already started running. She knew exactly how much she trusted Nakamura. But she also knew that he knew it too. Then Nakamura joined back in the channel, a bit of cockiness reentering in his voice. "Well, then one last bit of education from this primitive. A reminder really. While your transmissions are securely encrypted, you helped the Pirates break ours."

A new broadcast rang across the spectrum, deep and slavering, the sound of a long tongue over many teeth. "My enemies standing together, betrayed by their own. How very nice to kill."

The Last caught sight of movement out the spire's windows, a distant shape rising up over lip of the plateau. It was huge and dark, bristling with vicious metal. Ridley's command ship was no longer hiding in its valley landing site, and the planetary bombardment capable starship was now aimed squarely at the Last's position from two miles away.

Nakamura's broadcast returned. "By now Aran should have blocked your exit." The Last spun back, in time to see Samus wedge herself in the doorway. From somewhere in orbit, Nakamura just continued with the same self assurance. "She may not like me, but I have always trusted her assessment of the Chozo. Sorry Aran, this is the best I could do. I would not have been in position for a proper strike for another two minutes. Ridley was closer."

Ridley's transmission growled with inhuman pleasure. "Close enough to taste your ash. Fire!"

The atmosphere erupted into flame as the Pirate ship blasted its massive wave-beam weapon straight at the spire, igniting what little oxygen there was above the plateau by the force of its passing. By starship terms it was point blank. That made it all the more surprising when the fireball cleared and the spire still stood, surrounded by flickering ribbons of light. Thin floating auroras trailed back toward the Pirate ship, tracing a line even as they began to fade from sight.

Inside the spire chamber the central pillar glowed and shone with the energy absorbed, even as the structure trembled from what managed to slip past. The machine's light spread out, washing over the two battle-suits in a shifting maze of reflections. The Last's face was invisible within his hemet, but Samus could still taste his scorn and disgust. "Blind, pitiful creatures. My life's work was understanding the transmission of energy and you think to threaten me with those sticks and stones? I programed these automated defense myself. Now, I have had enough of this charade."

He took a step towards the central control panel. On the coms, Ridley roared with fury and frustration. He shouted a command and the main cannon of his ship began to glow again as it charged for a second attack. The ship accelerated, pushing closer to the spire to close its range. However, this time the incinerating blast did not even brush the tower, instead it was picked apart by a web of light just outside the ship.

Then Nakamura's voice returned, almost casual in tone. "I admire your persistence, Commander Ridley. That new weapon of yours is truly powerful. However, you drop your ship shields when you fire it. Also, I may have misled you on my orbital effectiveness."

A pillar of blinding light lanced down from the blue sky, stabbing into the back of the Pirate ship. However, once Samus' visor tint adjusted she saw the characteristic shimmering ribbons beginning to reach up towards this new attack. Ridley's roar continued on the coms, but in one breath it smoothly transitioned to a chuffing, gloating laugh.

"Those who do not value fury do not understand it. They see me charge and they think they will kill me. I only wished to be near the tower. Now I have traded a scratch on this one ship for the humans' weapons to be targeted by the Chozo defense as well. You are now locked in space. Thank you, fool, for wanting to kill."

Inside the spire, Samus suddenly shouted and sprang forward, suit jets rocketing her across the room towards the Last with her weapon raised to strike. The Last was startled by her abrupt battle cry and stepped back, easily dodging out of the way. However, that just allowed her to hit her true target. The heavy bludgeon of her weapon arm smashed down through the energy mechanism's control panel, reducing delicate engineering to shards and smoke. The Last raised his own gun but Samus kept him off balance by only straightening up and starting to speak with her back still to him.

"The blacklist is set and locked, covering any energy with line of sight to the spire, range two hundred miles. Now no one gets to play outside."

The Last twisted his head back around as he noticed the federation transmission spike was no longer slaved to his control. That long period of back and forth conversations had given Samus plenty of time to sneak past The Last's hastily applied firewall. Now everyone had heard her message.

The following moment of silence stretched out across all transmission channels, on the planet and in space. All four parties waited to see if anyone else was going to unveil yet another trump card.

After a few more seconds, Nakamura said, "...All right. Well then, Aran, since you can hear me, Aurora has been freed to give you unrestricted aid. Do what you do best and eliminate all the hostile forces on the planet. Once the immediate threat is gone, we can have our own discussion. Nakamura out."

Ridley, never one to let someone else have the last word, chimed in too. "Samus, you failed in our deal. You are too weak. Now I will march my forces across this world. They will tear you and your chozo out of your skin and I will lick your living bones."

Samus only waved vaguely in the distance as Ridley's ship slowly turned around and limped back to its canyon-shielded landing site, trailing smoke as it flew. Then she turned back to The Last, wondering how he had been so quiet lately. Usually he loved to talk. Then the microscopic trembling across the surface of his armor gave the answer, the faint, nearly invisible tremors. He was frozen with a rage a being like him had likely never experienced before.

Then he threw back his head and screamed.

...


	18. The First

Chapter 18

The First

...

In the smoking armory, the surviving members of the cult of the god-painters scrambled to their feet and ran off after the sounds of battle leaving them behind. Their messiah was newly armed in shining armor and now chased after the devil herself. Even the prospect of looting a Chozo armory could not overcome that religious draw. They fled, leaving their fallen behind, strewn across the floor.

A moment later one of the fallen Pirates opened an eye. He looked around for a second, scanning the abandoned room, before opening his other three eyes. Then he sat up and reached out to tap the corpse beside him.

"Hey, Kiber-2272. They're gone."

At the first touch, that fallen pirate flailed in panic before realizing that tap was not a hostile action. Then he opened his eyes and looked around, crouching down to stay as hidden behind his companion as he could. "1161, you are empirically the most defective Zegar I have ever met."

"I told you it would work. When a squad meets the Hunter, command just assumes everyone is going to die so no one asks questions. She doesn't bother shooting anyone once you fall down."

Kiber-2272 slowly stood up, still much more hesitant than Zegar-1161. He shook his head in disbelief. "We've encountered the Hunter three times and we're still alive. This statistical anomaly is outrageous. I've honestly considered the theory that I'm an AI in an immersive training environment. It would at least explain why you are such a poor imitation of a person."

"Come on, don't believe that."

"All right, that may have been unsupported criticism against you but-"

"No, I mean don't believe in AIs. I bet all those supposed programs are just the living brains of some unfortunate grubs the science clans scooped out to shove in so-called _computers_."

2272 slowly turned to stare at him. "You don't believe in computers? Are your seriously-"

Then 1161 held up his claw. "Shh! I heard something."

They both ran together, pressed back to back, and raised their weapons out at the still somewhat smoking chamber.

"What did you hear? Was it the Hunter coming back? Was it the Chozo? Was it both?"

"No, she usually sounds more like gunfire and explosions. This sounded like blinking."

2272 lowered his weapon as he turned in renewed exasperation. "I know your augmentation specs, you cannot hear _blinking_. What would that even sound like, you-"

A new voice spoke up. "Um, hello?"

2272 spun around in panic and fired a blaster shot in a purely random direction. It was decidedly more luck than skill that it managed to streak right over the face of another Pirate soldier who had hurriedly thrown himself back down on the ground.

1161 managed to aim his own weapon claw at the newly revealed third survivor before he recognized it and relaxed. He said, "Wow, that was close." There was a brief pause. "Shoot him again."

2272 quickly lowered his claw and clicked his mandibles in what he hoped was a sincere and reassuring way, mindful that they were back under the ears of the cult. Ever since they accidentally got swept up in the Chozo's personal guard and missed the following purge order by virtue of being together in rearguard, he had been very hard to keel a low profile. "Uh 1161, your neural implant is, uh, acting up again. You meant to say _help_ him. That explosion must have shaken something lose in you. Can do weird things, explosions, like even make people incorrectly hear us regret the presence of the angelic Chozo majesty."

"Ok, I'll shoot him."

2272 managed to reach over and shove 1161's weapon out of the way before anything more regrettable happened. This decision was aided by the fact that this other survivor seemed more intent on cowering than defending the cult dogma. The third Pirate said, "No, don't do that! We don't report to the god-painters either!"

2272 exhaled in relief. "At least there's one more non-defective...Wait. We?"

A low voice hissed from among the corpses. "Shut up, Voctum."

1161 straightened up. "Cybernetic zombie slave programs. I knew command was implanting those. Well, start incinerating heads."

By now 2272 felt like 1161's paranoia was somehow infecting the reality around them. He waved his weapon indiscriminately at all the bodies scattered around them. "Everyone! You will be shot unless you get up right now!"

2272 could hear the trembling in his own voice but despite it, two more 'dead' Pirates complied and climbed up to their feet. They were both Shakshi clan and skittered over to join the Voctum clan individual who had first blown their cover.

Zegar-1161 was shaking his head. "No, no, I don't like it. How did they know the plan to fake our deaths? They must have hacked into our neural implants and live-monitored our conscious nervous systems. Only the Chozo could manage that on the fly, so they have to be working for it. We need to shoot them now or they'll betray us to the cult and hack us to pieces for heresy. I hope you're listening to my thoughts now, cultists, because I have a few choice-"

"No! We heard you whispering together!"

1161 paused in mid rant. "Oh. That fits the data too. We did get a bit loud at one point."

"And I _was_ blinking. I'm impressed you heard that."

1161 turned back to Kiber-2272. "Their story checks out."

The Voctum abased himself, exposing his neck as he bowed. "Thank you. Please, Kiber, listen to the Zegar."

"I say we shoot them anyway."

"Don't listen to the Zegar!"

Kiber-2272's shell felt too tight around his head. Nothing made sense today. Right now he just yearned for a damp hive, a high perch, and clear scientific orders from a logical commander. But he did not have that.

"Let me extrapolated. You were swept up in the Chozo guard detachment as well?"

"Yes. When the order came through to purge all individuals loyal to Commander Ridley we three happened to be standing next to each other. We could hear gunfire out in the hallways and by the time the next god-painter came by we just saluted and said we'd executed the heretics. That line always works, no matter who's in charge."

"I like this guy's logic."

Kiber-2272's shell felt even tighter. "Shut up, 1161."

The three other Pirates huddled together. "We...thought you two had a plan. Oh no, we committed treason against the god-painters at the expectation of new leadership. But you two are idiots. Aww, they're going to peel us out of our skeletons."

"Hey! We have...a plan."

"We do? I was still intending to incinerate their heads."

"Shut up!"

One of the Shakshi clan turned to her comrade. "Maybe Commander Ridley will win instead. He'll probably just decapitate us."

"Oh, yes. I would much prefer that."

Kiber-2272 felt like rattling his abdomen plates in a primal shriek. However, in the middle of the swirling storm of fear, confusion, and certain death, a new unfamiliar emotion began to faintly warm his ventricles. Someone had looked to him as a leader. It had only lasted until he opened his mandibles to speak but it was still a very pleasant sensation. Distantly, he was aware of nearly vestigial ambition glands that now quivered into life, secreting a few measly molecules of command hormones into his brain.

He clacked his pincers together and the other four pirates jerked in surprise. "Right. Your lives now depend on the whim of antagonistic superiors who would prefer you ground into nutrient paste. What, exactly, has changed from your prior existence? No matter what result is most probable, crouching down to torpor here until you die will not improve anything. Look around us, we are in a genuine Class 1 forage site! Think of what technology we might find in this facility! If once we are apprehended we have a horde of plunder in our arms we actually stand a decent chance of buying our lives, no matter which side finds us first."

"Except the metroids."

"Shut up, 1161."

"Or the Hunter."

"Shut up, 1161!"

The Voctum clan member exchanged a look with the two Shakshi and they actually seemed appeased. He turned back. "That was genuinely a logical speech." He held out one hand with three sharp bright green claws, palm up in traditional subservience contract position. "Right, we pledge to serve you with our lives, right up until the moment a more powerful force wishes for us to betray you or offers us a greater probability of advancement."

Kiber-2272 felt his primary eyes mist up with emotion. Truly, it was a scene out of the legendary technical manuals.

...

Dust filled the dark air, occasionally crackling with electricity from the power of the weapons being fired through the abandoned temple halls. Samus slammed back against a wall, friction modulators allowing her to grip on polished stone and fling herself to the side just as The Last's plasma beam splashed into the slabs with a blaze of blinding fire. Samus raised her weapon and fired off three missiles in an arcing path, curving them around and to distract her opponent for a second. Keep him off balance, use his lack of combat instincts against him, that was the key. She could not allow him a spare moment to think, to use his technical knowledge. The Last was terrifyingly intelligent, and at the moment Samus felt rather lacking in that department.

She could feel her thoughts getting slower with each hour she ran across this planet. Aurora's experimental life energy injection system might have healed the injuries from the orbital drop, but Samus' body still remembered. Stress hormones were building up in her nerve cells and she was burning through neurotransmitter molecules faster than her blood and implants could supply them. Samus had been fighting continuously for over forty-eight hours at this point, since the Diomedes first dropped out of jump, and an eleven hour medically induced coma at the edge of death did not count as rest.

Samus beam weapon charged and shot, blue tinged energy lancing out through the debris. The Last avoided it, his automated suit systems handling the dodge so the beam only hit the floor, but then his foot came down on the slick surface that ice beam shot had really intended to make. The Last slid, falling, and Samus seized her chance to hold her ground, charging a super missile in her weapon for every possible deci-second. In his panic, the The Last fired wildly as he fell but Samus did not twitch, knowing it would miss. However, the crack of breaking rock above her showed it had not missed the carved stone support beam in the ceiling. The very heavy stone beam was directly above her.

There was not time for a decision, yet nevertheless she made it. She held her ground and fired her fully charged shot, hitting The Last directly in the armored chest. The Chozo shouted as his shields took the brunt of the hit yet still allowed some of the roaring impact through. However, the floor beneath him had no shields. Paving slabs splintered and collapsed as The Last fell with them.

Then the falling stone beam hit Samus and she caught it across her shoulders. The impact shook the room and bent her knees but her augmented muscles strained along with the suit to lift the pillar, even as her boots crunched deep into the paving slabs beneath her. Samus even had time to start a breath before the floor gave way entirely.

Samus fell down through the darkness as this upper level of the temple crumbled around her. Fifty feet below, The Last landed heavily on the next floor and whipped his head up as inside his helmet the suit screamed proximity alarms. Suit jets ignited to fling him out of the way, but Samus spun in air and shot out a grapple beam to grab the falling stone support beam. She flung it his way and with the thunderous impact a floor gave way once more.

Samus and the Last fell together through the rubble as they plunged out of the dark into a soft orange light. Even at free-fall the fight continued, energy blasts and missiles ringing out across a cavernous void. However, in the midst of combat and plummeting chaos Samus still had time to recognize the flexing mechanical arms of the great central spindle in a huge spherical room. They had just broken down into the Library of the Winnowers. At this point Samus just hoped the swarm of hunting metroids were not still around here.

She spun in air as she fell and aimed her head to plummet face down, accelerating towards the ground with both suit jets and missile recoil. At the very last second she flipped and fired her jets to mitigate the smashing impact. Her boots hit the ground and the shock sent micro-fractures propagated up her limbs in a wave, racing through the percentage of her skeleton that was still calcium based, but that did not matter compared to having half a second to prepare her next attack. Then a new set of jets flared and The Last landed beside her, a meteor of gleaming metal.

Suit scan analyzed the state of his armor, but Samus did not need to read those results to confirm what intuition told her. In this war of attrition, The Last was still winning. He had a full suite of systems in perfect repair, superior weapons, and more shields. Samus launched into close range combat again, but this time The Last accepted this change in the fight. He joined her grapple, and instead of attempting to escape, his gauntlet gripped her wrist. Samus twisted to see the blinding sphere of spinning light emerging from his weapon barrel. A power bomb.

The Last knew he had more shields too.

The explosion hit them both. Samus flew back through fire and for a moment vanished from the world of memory. Continuity of biological consciousness had an acceleration cut-off point. A second later her cortex recovered but her cerebral implants could only supply a limited history of the interim, tactical data of position, velocity, and gyroscopic orientation. Samus blinked. It seemed she had flown through a wall. And then the wall had followed her. And then they had both tumbled down approximately one thousand and seventy three stairs deep into the lightless bowels of the Temple.

As she sat up in the rubble and dust, the suit switched vision modes and revealed a new dark vaulted chamber. Nearby, The Last was already rising to his knees. That power bomb attack had blown apart a section of the Library's lower bowl, caving it into an adjacent stairwell of seemingly endless length. The Last was now on his feet, and Samus was too late to dodge. However, the Chozo's weapon never pointed her way. Instead he turned and ran, footsteps echoing through the maze of black hallways as the sound mingled with the rattle of rubble still rolling down the endless stair.

Sometimes, victory in battle was just convincing your opponent you would not stay down. The Last still had the advantage but he was not used to pain. Even to those they punished, the Chozo were kind, at least as they saw it. In her decades Samus had been hurt more by her friends than this person had been hurt by any enemy. Something as small as a near fatal point blank explosion would not cause her to flee.

The Last broke and Samus ran after him. At this point she was beyond thought, the decision to chase was no longer a conscious decision. He simply fled and so she hunted. It was who she was. The confusion and pain of her body were not relevant. However, that gap in strategic planning did open up mental resources to analyzing her surroundings.

They were far beneath the main body of the temple now. These endless tight corridors did not just feel abandoned, they felt like they had never been lived in. In each chamber, the sharp and angular walls were unadorned and the dimensions were cramped. The dark passages between them wound and undulated through the solid rock in an almost natural way, as though this planet was gnawed in the deep by wormlike things. This was somewhere the old temple builders had not liked to think about.

However, The Last seemed to know where he was going even as the scent of panic oozed into his decisions. Through it all, he was always just out of sight, as they raced past endless chambers holding strange and glowing things, bits of machinery and other Chozo technology. From time to time, Samus spared a moment to smash into one of the devices and allow her suit to drink hungrily from their power supplies. As the crack of splitting metal rang out, The Last's voice cracked through the suit coms, words thick with hatred and disgust and fear.

"Thief. Destroyer. You...carnivore. Despicable thing, you only live off the death of others!"

But the sounds of his fight had stopped and now mixed with the clunking of something mechanical and heavy. Then Samus rounded a corner and was confronted by a large and heavy door, now left ajar. It looked like a vault. The Last was inside.

Samus stepped into the vault, lit only by the glowing fire charging within her weapon barrel. This space was not small like the other chambers she had passed, but was instead a large vaulted rectangle. Scan showed powerful energy signatures within the walls but all that seemed more like supporting systems then the focus of this room. Indeed the focal point seemed to be emptiness, only the space these walls enclosed.

The Last stood near the center of the room, facing the door. "My people-"

Samus fired. The beam streaked towards him but at the last moment it deflected strangely, twisting in area between. The flash briefly illuminated the room and in that moment Samus noticed the faint indications of folded space. In the center of this chamber, something was hidden behind the air, something big. The Chozo liked to hide things but this was the most powerful interaction warp field Samus had ever encountered. The strength of these projectors could have fueled an intersystem battleship.

The Last tried to sound condescending, but by now that tone came through ragged and broken. "Have you not grown tired of that by now? What did my people become, that they created you? Twisted a primitive alien into this crude instrument of destruction. You fight without thought, you kill without meaning. The two looter species out there, that crazed cult, at least they have something they hope to gain in this battle. They aim towards a victory for their race. But you...you are just an automaton, following the last stupid instructions of a long departed creator."

He was talking again, and since he didn't seem to be doing anything at the moment Samus decided to encourage that. A few minutes of pause would let her medical nanites finish draining the blood that explosion had left pooling in her brain.

She said, "Your route through these lower tunnels grew less direct at the end. You knew what you were searching for would be in this sector, but not which chamber. It is something installed after your conviction, yet you know it still exists. It is something of yours."

The Last tilted his helmet as he watched Samus. It was a gesture unnervingly like one Grey Voice had used. "It was in that room above us, where I first laid eyes on you, that I knew it was still here. I had began to doubt but I should not have lost faith. My people could never bare to destroy what they could hide away. Ever curious, ever tempted."

A few pieces clicked into place in Samus' head. This was an evidence vault. What ever The Last had done to be imprisoned in a stasis box for a millennium, a monument to it was in here. The faint ripple in the center of the dark air refused to give up any information beyond the roughest dimensions of its bulk, and The Last's position guarded the control system. However, now that Samus had successfully gotten him monologuing again, she slowly started to edge to the side, imperceptibly angling towards a clear firing line.

The Last must have been an instructor at one point in addition to a scientist, because he effortlessly fell into lecture. "One created, knowledge cannot be destroyed. It is indelible. That was the crime I committed, that I opened a door and my fellows could see this new path stretched before them. I gave them infinity and they sentenced me to oblivion."

Samus continued to distract him. "But they left the door open."

The Last snapped his helmet around to face Samus with a burning intensity that crested past hatred into desperation. "No! You do not get to say those words. I found the slabs. I read the message. It was written to me! The door was left open for me! They were talking to me! The planet's prophecy speaks to me, not...you." The fervent need was painful in The Last's voice. "It has to be about me. If it's not, it means my people never forgave me."

Samus could see the trembling tension under that armor, the sagging shoulders of a being pushed to the very edge. This kind of delicate communication was not Samus' speciality, but she might still be able to draw him back. The Last had very nearly reached his lowest point, and so was open to the greatest change.

She said, "The others honor you. They sent your body away, but your equation is the heart of the people, their science, and their culture. For all the time you slept, you lived in every breath they took. Energy is matter, matter is life, life is thought, and thought is energy."

The Last looked away from her. His helmet tipped down to loom down at the long-fingered gauntlet covering his left hand as it slowly flexed in an almost meditative way. "You may mimic our speech but you understand nothing, twisted mutant thing. You do not know why they trapped me in that box. It was not just because I discovered the truth. It was because I created a demonstration."

One of those long fingers flicked out, operating a virtual control board and then the energy hum of the room began to change. The ripple behind the air began to waver. Samus could feel the path towards resolution slipping away, but she still had to try and grab it.

"The Empire expelled you, but the empire left with you. What it became was better. To raise up all they met, to let all life touch the path, that was the existence you created for our people. Because of that, the Chozo still walk in the minds of a hundred species across the galactic arm, the humans and so many others. Those species are still following those footsteps, and in the future they are one hundred more species of chozo; all children of your genius."

Her words felt awkward and rusty, unused tools at the best of times. Now all Samus could do is hope and wish she had learned as much from Grey Voice as she had from Old Bird. The Last froze, unreadable under the armor. In between them, the air rippled and a huge dark shape began to enter into the room, motionlessly sliding out from the cube's ninth corner.

"Children," The Last said and for a single instant Samus felt an uncharacteristic trill of hope. Then The Last continued, "No. Other females might bare eggs, raise children, but not me. This work, this work is my child."

The center of the room thudded with displaced air as a massive cylinder materialized into the conventional dimensions, but Samus was momentarily preoccupied by an incongruous brush of embarrassment. It was true she had only ever met two living Chozo, both male. It was also true that the Chozo artistic representation which had constituted the rest of her education was deliberately androgynous by stylistic choice. However, Samus still felt that inward wince as she realized she had assumed The Last was male based on exactly no information. She should have known better, enough people had made the same assumption about her.

Then Samus was brought back to the moment quite firmly by the thunderous thump of something hitting the inside of the huge cylinder. Samus tilted her helmet towards it, trying to keep the Last still in her sights as she did so. The cylinder was filled with something, something black and shifting. The motion inside was increasing, as though something powering up. Or waking up. A second thump rang the vault and this time Samus saw a massive, constantly shifting appendage pressed against the cylinder wall, capped with a bloom of claws or teeth. Then the limb was reabsorbed, but as it vanished, the oily black surface momentarily parted to show an interior of suspended red clusters on wiry threads, brain-like globules held in a large transparent core.

The Last turned back towards Samus. The Chozo straightened her back, rising up to her full eight feet of height. "Tradsiak M'etroid, we named this facility. At the time it referred to the ultimate hunters for truth. I suppose after they betrayed me, the others found a more appropriate interpretation. Poor copies they made, but I suppose all forgeries must be. Allow me then to introduce you to my masterwork, the thesis of the Life Energy Equivalence project. Behold, you stand before the first Metroid."

...


	19. Blood and Strength

Chapter 19

Blood and Strength

...

In the center of the dim vault, the outer case of the newly manifested hidden cylinder shone and began to dissolve. Samus tapped the temple of her helmet, urgently trying to scan the dark roiling mass inside that great column. What she got back was not encouraging. The Last Chozo had called this the first metroid. Samus' first sensor brush did show organic materials and warp-supported crystalline structures much like true metroids but then active scan abruptly stopped reporting. The shapeless flowing thing was black, so unbelievably black. It was like this thing in the tube was eating all electromagnetic frequencies.

There were still a few seconds before it fully exited containment. Samus spent those charging an attack, but she could talk at the same time.

She said to the Last, "This is a poorer decision than you can imagine. You are missing historical data. The scientists who followed you tried to control many versions of the metroid project, but every instance ended in catastrophic failure. The empire lost an entire planet to them! No matter how well you think you understand them, those creatures will not be controlled."

The Last stepped back as she watched the containment cylinder, hardly seeming to notice Samus any more. From inside her battle-suit the Last murmured, "Dangerous, yes, but there is no one left to hurt."

"You're still here!"

"You fear for me? Needless. I saw to my protection long ago."

In a faint flash of disappearing matter the containment cylinder was gone and the pulsing mass of the first metroid spilled forth. It was black in a shade beyond color and in places it almost disappeared, as if it was eating the light itself. Then the dark fangs began to emerge as if being created in that second and the creature suddenly sprouted appendages around the suggestion of a domed core, shapeless pulsing tentacles the emerged and dissolved on a whim, servant to a momentary need. The First looked nothing like no other form of metroid Samus had seen in her long career but somehow it still matched. It was shaped like the memory of a monster.

Then the creature exploded into motion and black tentacles studded with crackling fangs whipped out at The Last. Samus was just about to fall into her standard scenario for "the monster devours its overconfident creator" when, with equal speed, the attack froze. The First's undulating mass drew back in on itself, black flesh parting for an instant to expose a familiar transparent core structure with brain-like globules floating inside. Then new thin tendrils reached out from shifting black flesh to slowly twine around the air surrounding The Last. Feeling towards the Chozo but never touching. The creature could sense her energy, and it remembered. The Last was right, whatever protections she had designed still held.

The Last held out her hand, the long fingers of her gauntlet just barely missing touching the lightless flesh. Then she spoke to Samus. "You are surprised. Lower creatures like you never understand the difference between thought and instinct. So they fear creation, but fear is merely another lying instinct. True thought serves the thinker. And this wonder is my genius made manifest. Even those false copies the others made still know me as their master, all those generations later."

She looked at the horrific First Metroid with something Samus recognized. Pride and hope and fear, and something that might even be love. It was how her chozo parents had sometimes looked at her.

Samus now held a blazing fire contained inside the barrel of her gun, aimed directly at the shifting mass of the proto-metroid. She said, "I'm going to kill it."

"You will try."

But neither of them was certain. In that instant their intentions battled for control of the Path so for a moment the stasis before combat still held. The Last had recruited a questionably loyal monster to her side in an attempt to tip the scale of battle, but Samus could match that move. The fingers of her gauntlet twitched, navigating through virtual menus as she undid a few digital locks. It was time to stop fighting with a hampered suit. It was time to let 'Adam' out to play.

Deep in the core suit systems, virtual partition dropped and battle calculations from the suit computer once more filled Samus' eyes. The suit was fully awake and an equal partner once more. But with it came the little floating text.

" _Your choice still awaits. Wonderful death; painful life._ "

Comforting as always. Samus breathed out slowly.

The Last turned back her way, still lecturing. "Understand-"

Samus fired a charged super missile from thirty feet away, definitively interrupting the conversation. In the inclosed space of this rock-walled vault chamber, the pressure wave was almost as destructive as the initial explosion. Chozo power suits could weather that easily, but the demonstratedly pliable flesh of the First Metroid should find it a harsh introduction. 'Should' but in any case, Samus would find out. After all, this was the learning portion of the fight.

The First did not react in time to dodge the missile; Samus' first discovery. The impact hit directly against the metroid's side, the explosion throwing its creator back until her suit initiated friction lock on the floor, sliding to a halt. Unfortunately, then the explosion flash cleared and the First showed no visible injury; the second discovery. Samus had known that was a strong possibility for a Metroid, but it was still disheartening to not even see a scratch. On the other hand, beginning a fight by suggesting to the foe you're not a threat was often a good idea.

Then she flicked her eyes down. Tiny pressure fractures from the missile blast spiderwebbed across the stone floor around the creature but as Samus sprang to the side, guarding against its retaliation, she saw the cracks did not continue directly behind the creature. A long shadow of pristine floor stretched out from it. Third discovery; the creature was not unharmed, it was _unaffected_.

Learning was rarely fun.

However, it did provide time to charge an ice beam shot. The shapeless creature once again shifted and turned her way, fangs and tendrils unfolding as it started forward just in time for a flash of white energy to tear through the cavern. The ice bram hit and fang-studded tentacles writhed in pain as an electric shriek pulsed out from the air itself. The rock around them shook and to Samus' sensor aided eyes the stone was transformed, becoming faintly magnetic from just the power of the first metroid's screaming fury. It was not as much pain as Samus would have liked but in battle sufficient quantity can always make up for quality. She continued firing more beam attacks.

Adam's text blinked back into her visor. " _You can defeat it. Your opponent knows this. Their intention has another weapon._ "

Samus followed up on the ice beam barrage with another missile, but this one exploded in mid air. Off to the side, the Last now held her own weapon outstretched, barrel capped with wavering heat from the shot that had met Samus' missile.

The Last spoke through the communications channel as if she sat inside Samus' helmet. "You still think I went to the armory to enter this suit, to mimic your strength. You are blind. My strength has never been in crude combat. Know that any means to enter also provides for exit. And I now hold the key to that door."

The Last raised her hand and a light shimmered above her gauntlet, materializing into a small metallic crystal, covered in burning glyphs. As she held it this thing floating in the air, the gauntlet around her hand began to shimmer and peel back, armor withdrawing like a mechanical tide. Samus recognized that crystal instantly. Grey Voice had made sure she memorized suit safety procedures, though Samus had lost her own copy of that device nearly immediately after leaving Zebes. Safety procedures. Unfortunately, right now a key to automatically open any Chozo battle suit did not seem likely to make her more safe.

Killed by EMT equipment. If word ever got out, the bounty hunter gambling circuit was about to make a certain one armed Byratian sex-monk very rich. Samus eyed the levitating key and calculated how to grab it in the next few seconds.

As if reading her thoughts, the Last moved the key away ever so slightly, still floating above her newly bare hand. Her eyes narrowed. "A useless plan, ending in mutual defeat. Which to me would be a victory. Without this suit I am still Chozo, but you are that suit. Without it you are nothing, only a single broken component without a purpose. Prey for two superior species."

Samus crouched and sprang forward, just barely avoiding the next attack of fanged tentacles from the proto-metroid as she raced straight towards the Last. It was never a good idea to take your opponent's advice on tactics. As soon as the monster was put down Samus would be happy to take The Last on hand to hand. The Last steeled, then noticed Samus' confidence and lost some of her own. Step by step, beat by beat, Samus felt herself slipping into the familiar rhythm of battle. This was just a new game now, separate the Last from the key, wear down the metroid, kill, use key against the Last. Kill again.

The pitch black First Metroid screamed in frustration and pain from the ice blasts Samus directed its way, then its constantly shifting shape crackled with energy as it began to float up off the ground to hover in the air, an irregular ball of shifting mass and whipping tentacles. Ominous, but Samus was not impressed. Gravetic levitation was old hat for the things she fought. Then her suit sensors and inner ear both suddenly told her that _down_ had just relocated.

Samus fell sideways off the floor towards the twisting black maw of the First Metroid, a vortex of hook-like fangs. In a split second she twisted away and fired all her suit jets to avoid that final crunch. But she knew better than to try and fight this sudden gravity attack, and aimed perpendicular to the sudden drop. She missed the First by inches, flying past its long teeth in a makeshift orbit. Samus skidded across the ground before slamming to a halt, friction modulators gripping down as much as they could.

So, this creature could create gravity wells. Samus' opinions on the fun of learning remained intact.

More calculations. The Last seemed undisturbed by this gravity force despite standing very near the monster, which meant the gravity field somehow propagated in a cone instead of a sphere. That was impossible, but impossible was usually the starting point for Chozo science. Then the First lurched and from its black shifting body more massive tentacles erupted, studded in foot-long teeth. One fang managed to scrape across Samus' shields near her shoulder and she gritted her teeth in the familiar agony of a feeding metroid.

Samus dodged and deflected the next tentacle strikes with explosions of her own, but in the middle of this pitched battle the Last slowly walked over to the pulsing mass of the metroid's body. She was not talking anymore. Samus prepared for chozo blaster fire to begin complementing the monster's attacks, but instead of firing The Last simply reached out to lay her left hand against the side of her creation. Then Samus realized that hand held the Key.

Faint golden light sparkled as black flesh boiled over the floating artifact. Then the light was extinguished; swallowed.

Text appeared in Samus' visor, " _The key is now alive. Light integrated to shadow. Where it touches, your suit will not exist. This is good news._ "

Samus could not spare a moment to silence the Adam virus or the breath to let it know her opinion of these insane ramblings. She was fighting for her life and chipper prophecies of doom were not helping, though at least the suit's combat programs were now operating at full efficiency, freed of the imprisoning partition. The First Metroid screamed again and five more long tentacles whipped out of its body, forming from nothing in the instant they attacked. Samus shot back, deflecting black flesh with burning cold, but in the background of this clash The Last simply turned away and began to walk towards the vault's only door. Samus leapt and fired tracking missiles at her but The Last's suit spun back to shoot them out of the air. Samus would have followed with another attack, but she then had to spin back and paint half the First Metroid's side with ice beam energy or be eaten.

Samus' helmet rang as the frost-burned monster screeched and crackled across the EM spectrum, swamping all the communications channels for another instant. Samus eyes widened in surprise as she was looking straight at the First this time and briefly the creature in somehow greater detail. More definition and more shadow, skin dark green instead of black. Then its flesh resumed its impossibly black shade and the screaming electric noise once more cut out. Samus eyes narrowed. Another thing to learn; the creature's energy eating invulnerability could be at least mitigated.

The Last's voice replaced her creation's on the coms, "Goodby, tortured thing." She stood in the doorway as she slid past the massive vault door that hung ajar. "Your creators were cruel to have made you, cruel to set you on this path. If they lie on mine, I will condemn them. Your name will burn in their minds, Samus Aran, and I will bring justice."

Then she was gone.

Samus' suit jets ignited and she launched towards the vault door after The Last but in mid-flight her motion suddenly reversed with an uncomfortably familiar jerk. Intense gravity pulled her back, waves of damage rippling through her suit and flesh as the gradient in acceleration between her foot and her head caused tides through bone and steel. Samus flung out her arms, grapple beam and blaster kickback in tandem pushed her from the path to those black fangs, but it was a near miss this time. Samus landed, spun, and leapt to avoid the next attack. One long whipping fang scraped her leg armor in another blast of screaming pain, excruciating but tactically irrelevant, but as her foot came down it now felt cold stone and gritting dust instead of the interior of her boot. The touch of the emergency exit key. Samus fired another volley of quick ice blasts to drive the First back and that bought her time for the suit to reform around her lower left leg, glowing as it did so, but that had been close. The First no longer needed to land a clean hit, by virtue of the Key anywhere it touched Samus' armor would just cease to exist.

She had inflicted damage with ice beam and missiles, but as Samus devoted a precious half second to assessing just how much damage a depressing sight emerged to clarity. The room was dustier than it had been, even accounting for the explosions. Samus' eyes took in the eroded look of the stone under the First's floating path, and flicked over to the various impact points where tentacle fangs had hit floor instead of Samus' heart. The rough shallow pits at each point told a clear story, the First was eating stone molecules, much more slowly than it consumed living organisms of course, but this thing's hyper powerful reaper field was gnawing not just at Samus' shields but at the fundamental atomic structure of the universe bit by bit. And if the First was anything like its descendants, that constant flow of energy was healing it every second. That was bad.

And she was now in the wrong position. The First had learned from their fight, and now a fanged tentacle, black as void, whipped towards her and all the avenues of escape were guarded by others appendages. No choice. The moment froze and stretched as Samus slipped into the grim peace of certainty. These instants where the future was perfectly visible were rare, but there was satisfaction even when they were terrible. Samus knew what she was going to do. When it came down to it, a warrior's body was just another piece of ablative armor. So the attack darted forward and Samus sprang to meet it, reaching out to grab hold of the largest curved fang in her hand even as it formed out of the First's roiling black flesh.

Her hand clamped down on the fang and shook with the terrible force of its impact, holding it back. In that same instant came the searing, screaming, unbearable pain as the metroid's reaper field began to eat the life energy out of her body, ripping and tearing cell by cell. But for that brief second the First's assault was stalled by a shield of Samus' blood and bone. Thought vanished under pain, the nerves in Samus' brain spasmed and froze in torture beyond perception, but Samus had lain her intention down at a level below mind, programed her retaliation into the thoughtless void. It was written in her body and in that fraction of a second the attack in her weapon finished charging. Just a tiny a moment more as the metal of her gauntlet holding the fang peeled back in a ripple of light. The Key's energy field undid the suit, leaving only a bare human hand holding back the ripping hunger of the metroid.

The second ticked, a finger began to shift on the trigger, but then the pain vanished.

Shock crashed through Samus' void and she froze without firing, stunned beyond even her instinctive training. The First froze as well, black tentacles shuddering in what had to be equal surprise. The life energy absorption was gone. Samus' bare, bleeding hand clutched the knife-like fang of the metroid but she felt nothing beyond its physical edge. The agony of the metroid had vanished, and the First expressed such confusion that it was not even pushing against her arm with simple strength. They simply stood together in frozen combat, both wondering why Samus was not dead.

Samus stared at her bare arm; the suit had retreated all the way back to her left shoulder under command of the Key. Then in absence of pain, her thoughts began again, making connections. The hatchling. The X parasite. The metroid gene therapy. There had been new organelles in her cells after that, things that the federation scientists had never been able to identify a use for. Or had never told her the use for. Memories flashed together, Aurora's impossibly effective life energy surge machine, The Last's confusion at Samus' resilience. And now the final touch, bare skin against a metroid reaper field, its greatest weapon neutralized.

Adam's text flashed in her eyes. " _Life in shadow. Truth exposed. I told you it was good news._ "

Then new fangs sprouted from the tentacle's black flesh and they sliced through Samus' arm like knives, severing meat and bone. The tentacle whipped away, withdrawing with its burden and Samus' left arm now ended in a red stump just below the elbow.

...

By age fifteen, Samus had reached her full adult height and her skill advanced with her strength. She had passed through the augmentation tanks more times than she could quickly recall and she had now fully integrated all the changes. Old Bird still won most of their sparring bouts, but now he had to rely only on his centuries of experience. When it came to strength and speed, Samus could match him.

Their lessons quickly reached the boundary of what even cybernetic biology could be pushed to, so they continued right past it. Now as she trained Samus wore an advanced blue skintight body suit, a quarter inch of material over her skin that continued to enhance her reflexes, strength, and sensory abilities beyond the capability of organic cells. With it on, Samus could feel vibrations in the ground of an insect walking ten feet away. She could feel every breath of air and taste its chemical composition with her entire body, each sensation fed directly into her integrated nervous system.

When her arm clashed with Old Bird's she could feel his breath rasping in his lungs.

Samus grunted and with a push Old Bird's blow was thrown back. That was the second time during this sparing match. Half a second later, his foot talons rasped the ground and threw up dust in an expert flick towards Samus' eyes. Samus avoided it but was forced to move back and in a swish of his robe, Old Bird was gone, leaving only the jumbled boulders of the broken battlefield under a dark sky of roiling yellow clouds.

Samus was ok with that. Her right hand held a small energy pistol and the shadow of a smile touched her lips. Blue eyes sparkled, in the right light they were lined with the faintest traces of crystalline enchantments inside them. Her aim was perfect now and her eyes could see the UV shadows of the rocks around them. Zebes was no stranger to predators but now Samus strode among them as the alpha. Old Bird was the one who ran through this broken expanse of rubble and ancient crumbled structures

Samus sprang up, easily leaping ten feet through the air to land lightly on a boulder peak, weapon ready to flick out towards any target. Even from this vantage she still could not see where Old Bird had gone to, but the air contained molecules of his breath and the almost imperceptible sounds of stealthy movement could narrow his presence down to a tightly limited area. The faintest breath of wind brushed the yellow hair that hung from Samus' high ponytail and she bolted forward, feet nearly silent even as she raced across the rocky ground after her mentor. She was unquestionably entering a trap, but any second she gave Old Bird to prepare would only make the trap more fearsome. Samus knew what she was, and knew she had no hope of outsmarting the Chozo, but now at least she could outfight him. She would not give him time to think.

She raced through the boulder field with the speed of a stooping falcon. Under her incredible strength, her movement was more like flight than running, each step a precisely angled leap horizontal across the ground. Then she saw it, the trace she sought in a dark shadow created by a large rock slab propped up on lower boulders. Old Bird had found terrain that limited Samus' sight, confined her actions with rock and shadow while leaving his own escape open. But it had taken him time to get here too, so Samus judged her teacher had had only nine seconds to prepare his traps. Analyzing what to do about this would cost Samus more seconds, but she had already decided on her course of action. She lunged into the shadow, and the speed of her passage created whirlwinds of dust.

The little gun in her hand flashed brightly under the rock slab and Old Bird dodged, but that shot had never been intended to land. It simply cut off an avenue of retreat and so defined Old Bird's location to one specific area. Samus' charge hit the Chozo head on, her fist slamming into his chest as her hips twisted with the attack. Old Bird flew back, smashing into a smaller boulder that cracked as he tumbled away, sliding on the floor. Samus' hand touched the cool shadowed ground as she landed, panting. She had put all her force into that attack, transferring every bit of her speed into more striking power as the punch brought her to an abrupt and total stop. But it had worked, the fight was over in one hit.

Then the cracked boulder Old Bird had hit crumbled and the huge rock slab it held up came grinding down.

The world rang and when Samus cleared her eyes she was on her back. She coughed on dust and then found she could not reinflate her lungs all the way. Her chest and stomach were pushed down, almost crushed by incredible force against her abdomen. Then the dust cleared and she remembered; the slab had fallen and she had not quite gotten away in time. Samus strained and squirmed but she was still pinned, half crushed beneath a rock that weighed almost two thousand times her body weight.

Then the shadow came again and Old Bird stood between her and the cloud-dimmed sun, black and featureless before a corona of light. Samus didn't bother to say anything, not that she was sure she could with the pressure on her ribs and the feeling that her belly was almost touching her spine.

Old Bird's face was hidden behind the light. "You lost. Do not trust in the strength of your body."

Samus grunted, fighting even for shallow gasps of air that came with great pain. It was very difficult to respond but she still did so. "I had to. Strength was my only advantage."

The shadow above her shifted. "Act without regard for advantage, and let it come unlooked for. Find the route to success for the weak and set that as your path. Strength only absorbs the margin of ignorance."

Samus grunted a laugh and then gaged silently as the rock shifted another inch against her compressed organs. "That's me. Ignorance wrapped in strength."

Old Bird was quiet for long moment. When he spoke it was almost inaudible. "That is not you. And your true strength is yet to come."

Then he helped Samus remove the rock slab.

...

The Chozo taught that the body was not important, just an ephemeral manifestation of the true self. A body was necessary and valuable, but that did not make it you. Samus' second parents had instilled that lesson in her.

During one of her final passes through the augmentation tank, they had stopped the process just before she lost consciousness. The nervous paralytics numbed half her body, and then Samus watched a gleaming medical blade neatly lop off her right hand at the wrist. It was a strange thing to see part of her body lying beside her, something that she had always considered just an extension of her thought now separate and limp.

Grey Voice instructed Samus to pick up that lump of meat and bone, to manipulate it with her remaining hand. There was no pain, no anxiety beyond what outdated instinct sobbing in the back of her mind. Samus knew that reattaching such an appendage was the work of seconds for chozo medical technology. However, Samus still felt that somewhere, deep within her brain, a monkey was screaming. She held the severed hand in front of her, turning and squeezing it. She saw the cut where bloody bones protruded, and felt how they slid around within the muscles and tendons. But was just a thing. It was not her.

The augmentation machine repeated the operation with her foot, again placing the severed object in her left hand to explore. Distantly Samus wondered how far they could carry this exercise, how many things she would become, but then the lesson was done and with a faint pump of sedative Samus went to sleep on the medical table.

When she awoke, she was whole and she was stronger.

...

Grey Voice summoned Samus into a previously unused room of the Zebes temple. When Samus arrived she saw a naked human body lying dead on the floor. It took a moment to process but once Samus overcame the strange perspective she realized the body was her own.

It was an exact copy. To accelerate the growth of a cloned body was an easy thing, as long as you did not care about survival or want it to have a developed mind. That was evidently what Grey Voice had done for the last few years, and now had a corpse on the floor of this room, identical in every way to Samus. This was the next lesson.

At Grey Voice's instruction Samus stripped out of her clothing and knelt beside her own dead body. She was to wash it, lifting and turning and prodding this limp avatar so that she might break down the barriers in her mind. Samus complied, and felt the curiously heavy weight of the corpse with every touch. There were mirrors on the walls and so she could see herself from every angle, one body alive and one body dead.

Grey Voice left without a word, so Samus knew the lesson was not over. She remained in the room and soon the greater purpose became clear. She was to wait and watch. Food was supplied, and drink, but no clothes or any mental stimulation. But Samus had learned patience so she sat there in the mirrored room, watching her own corpse.

Days passed and the body before began to rot. Samus continued to watch, and in the endless silent hours she meditated on the object in front of her. This corpse had once been indistinguishable from the thing Samus had once considered her true self. Now it was rotting, disintegrating but in truth very little had changed. Nothing had entered or exited this room. All the materials were still here, they were simply entering into a new configuration. Bit by bit the attachments of Samus' mind faded away, changing configuration until she was something new.

Two weeks later she exited the room, and when she did she was stronger.

...

People lay across the golden streets, dead and dying, painted dark with their own purple blood. They lay amid their broken and shattered wings Samus could feel the grief that wracked her body, the fear, and the unbearable physical pain from her wounds. She looked down at where five of her legs had been torn off, too weak to scream even if she could rub the tendrils together enough to make that noise, if they had not been burned off. She looked up with seven compound eyes at the bright orange sky and then all light faded as she died.

It was still dark as Samus returned to her mind and lay on the cold metal table, briefly returned to the chill and dust of Temple Zebes. The opaque helmet around her head cut off all sound and sight, but she could still feel to touch of air and metal. It would take Grey Voice another few seconds to load up the next memory simulation, the next vision of another life as it ended in horror and fear. But those were not Samus' feelings, just another sort of vision. Sometimes, in these moments between, Samus was not sure if these thoughts were her thoughts. Sometimes she could not remember if the cool metal table was touching her skin, or that of some other creature, a strange pale skinned ape on a far distant world.

Then Grey Voice finished with the device and once Samus plunged back into memory to live again. To die again. To die again and again and again, and through that horror learn wisdom.

After, she was stronger.

...

Samus looked up at Old Bird. The breath was hot and dry in her mouth under Zebes merciless sun but she still asked, once again. "Who am I?"

Old Bird pressed a finger to her chest. After years of observation, Samus could now notice that the hand trembled despite the tremendous strength behind it. It had always trembled, she just had not been able to see it.

Old Bird was quiet, almost a whisper. "That question. That question is you. Only that is you. And that is enough."

...

In the dim shadows of the vault, the First Metroid drew back its fang-covered tentacles towards the black central mass, one now clutching Samus' severed forearm. The globular monster was confused at the hand's refusal to dissolve into grey dust. It was proving quite indigestible and that was a new experience for a creature that freely ate basalt on a molecular level. Those black fangs had just sliced through bones that could survive atmospheric reentry, but the crackling shimmer of excess radiation failed to make any headway on eating simple meat. The unnatural gloom which surrounded the First seemed to flow, retreating from elsewhere to concentrate around fangs holding the hand as the monster strained.

Another drop of hot blood splattered against the dusty stone at Samus' feet but the remaining stump of her left arm was already at least partially dealt with. Auto-stints had deployed in her veins and artery to stop the blood loss and medical nanites were scrambling to construct temporary detour vessels and capillaries for all the flesh still left. In the absence of the Key's influence, the battle suit was reforming. Given enough time and materials the suit could fill in the gauntlet with the mechanisms to regain full manual control but for now that empty hand would have to stay limp. Empty but for pain.

Samus breathed out and felt her lungs spasm only slightly as she did so. Parts of her body wanted to go into shock, but that was just biology talking. She stepped forward. Biology was not in charge. The suit flashed warnings and alerts through her vision and haptic feedback, trying to establish new protocols for a user who had just been almost literally decimated, a user it could no longer protect while the Key was in play. Her next step was faster. Technology was not in charge either. Proximity sensors displayed in the visor suddenly showed multiple life forms outside the chamber and drawing closer, charging down the passage the Last had recently fled through. By the odds on this planet those newcomers were not going to be friendly but they were not in charge either.

The First floated in front of her, a swirling mass of teeth and darkness, and Samus charged. As the creature tried and failed to consume her hand, the EM-devouring blackness that coated it in invulnerability retreated over into what was was forming into a maw of gnashing fangs, a new organ for a new task. The First Metroid had been a thesis, the living expression of a mathematical solution and so this little piece of "2+2=5" was confounding it.

Confounded. Confused. Uncertain. That was weakness, and Samus wielded certainty like a spear from heaven. There was no time for thought, she just knew. Her dash eliminated distance and then she leapt, burning energy building up in the barrel of her gun.

"Override all restraints."

The moment hung in the air as the chozo battle suit breathed in. There was no need to clarify, with Adam free in the systems the suit knew exactly what she meant. Within each system, every weapon, every capacitor, every device that played freely with energy and matter, each and every rank of programed restraint instantly ended. Half a second passed and the suit shivered as every seam and junction in the armor's exterior began to bleed out light. In the space between tick and tock, Samus' leap began to be traced by blazing fire as the fury of the Chozo Empire was unleashed, all care for its wilder discarded. Terrible, burning, incredible power filled every inch and every particle. In this state the suit would soon destroy itself, torn to shreds by its own lightning fury, moments after Samus' own body burnt away. But in those seconds, it would be unstoppable.

Then Samus slammed against the side of the First and her suit automatically began to open up at the Key's first touch, peeling back layer by layer. However, currently the second layer was pure burning light and that overloaded energy burst outwards like an exploding angel. In that same instant and with all her strength, Samus plunged her weapon arm straight into the monster's shifting flesh even as the barrel began to separate. The charged shot she had held within detonated wildly as containment failed but Samus' punch continued even through it. Fire and frost swept past her face as the helmet split and withdrew, but Samus did not allow herself even to blink as her eyelashes smoked and skin burned. This was the path she had seen. This was the chance.

The First staggered back through the air, gravity fields thrown into flux as it struggled to recover from this suicidal charge. But even as it shifted focus away from the conundrum of the severed hand, the monster now had another problem. An equally indigestible object was pressed right in the center of a newly wounded area, and that object was punching the First over and over with the force to puncture steel.

Underneath Samus the metroid shifted and black tendrils rose around Samus like a pit of vipers, spearpoints sliding out of the tentacle sides as new fangs boiled into existence. Then Samus' fist clenched down behind the base of the nearest fang and with all her force drove it down at the heart of its creator. The First thrashed in a scream of pain as the fang hit the center of mass, but Samus could not hear anymore. Her helmet was gone and with it the ability to hear radio waves.

A thousand half-formed black teeth rose up on each side and bit into the retreating armor but Samus still slammed the fang in her hand down into the center of mass again and again. That fang soon melted away in her fist, reabsorbed, but she punched out to grab another tooth on another tentacle and continued to hammer the attack, the fang's base in her fist like a hand-ax. Around her a barbed whip formed and aimed at her head but in the final second Samus blocked it with what remained of her left arm, taking the piercing hit through skin and muscle just to direct the point away from her brain while she continued to slam her suborned spike down again and again. Then tentacle whose fang she held as weapon bulged and reformed, gifted with new strength now sufficient to overpower Samus' arm, but another new-formed fang swung in, still materializing. It left a gouge across her cheek but Samus snapped forward to grab its base in her teeth and then twist with all her might to slam the point back into the same injured spot. The First Metroid writhed and screamed.

Red human blood flowed like water, but the pitch dark green flesh retreated involuntarily under the assault, exposing the First's transparent globular core, now sporting a jagged crack above the suspended inner nerve clusters. One more strike. Then Samus' fist closed around the base of her latest suborned fang and she instantly knew she could not overpower the tentacle this time. After all the exertion and wounds, her strength had met its limit. Under the Key's influence the Chozo battle suit had withdrawn completely, spreading out behind her in unfolded strips like metal wings connected only by a single line along Samus' spine. The blue interface suit hung off her body in ribbons above bloody skin in a similar state. Samus' unprotected flesh pressed against the First's terrible fury in half a dozen places, skin to twisting, bubbling skin.

Which was the prerequisite to try the second part of her crazy theory.

Two years ago Samus had been infected by a deadly X parasite. The cure was nearly as dangerous, an infusion of self-propagating organelles from the blood of a metroid hatchling. It was unprecedented, unrepeated, and since then Samus had been silently collecting clues about side effects. Her new sensitivity to cold. Her resistance to the Last's prototype reaper field. The success of Aurora's life-energy absorption therapy. Touching that first fang. Side effects and capabilities. These dots led the mind in a certain direction, a suicidally stupid direction but in the face of certain death suicide was a viable strategy.

Even as Samus still struggled against the First's assault, still clutching her one hand onto the back of the long black fang she wrested against, she breathed deep, focused on her bare skin pressing against the First Metroid, and reached out towards the sensation of hunger.

For a second the First stopped and shivered. Then the moment was over, a hundred new small teeth bit into Samus' legs, and Samus heaved her right hand down, slamming the point of the long black fang directly into the heart. The transparent core split open and Samus plunged the First's black fang down through the thick clear gel into the globular red nerve cluster suspended at its center.

This time Samus almost thought she _could_ hear the scream. The First Metroid writhed, its unstable form exploding outwards in claws and teeth and shadow. It was a tornado of knives, an inferno of blades, and then all at once it collapsed into a thick black mud. Organic sludge collapsed on every side as the central mass suddenly dropped to the floor, gravetic levitation gone. Samus fell to her knees on the blood sluiced floor, too spent to even tremble, as she felt victory and relief flow into her like warm slow lightning. She had no helmet, she could not see the shield energy displays, but her reaper system had to have made a good meal out of this creature's death. It better have, as the darkness at the edges of Samus' vision meant the organic component of this partnership, Samus herself, was rapidly losing blood pressure from over a hundred slashes and puncture wounds. She knelt there one breath from collapse as her suit slowly drew back around her body.

In the center of the black and bubbling ruin a new light shone, a single small bright object emerging back into the physical world as it floated up from the corpse of its former captor. Slowly, Samus reached out and closed her sliced and frost-burnt and shattered fist around the Key and let the yellow glow signal that the suit had contained and integrated it. If things went well, the Last would come to regret leaving this behind. With the Key no longer active Samus' suit fully returned, quickly contracting and refolding around her. She welcomed it the way she welcomed air in her lungs. Speaking of which, at least one of those seemed to be punctured; her breathing felt wet. The world spun again but this time that was not a gravity attack, just the inner ear processing blood loss as acceleration, mixed in with the heavy nervous system noise of excruciating pain.

But, for the moment, she was alive. And she had won. Now she just had to plan for what came next.

The transparent green visor slid back over Samus' eyes as her hemet returned, reforming around her, and with it came the blinking yellow dots to remind her of the unknown entities racing towards her outside the vault.

Oh yeah, sensors had picked up life signs rushing down the vault hallway. That had also happened during the fight. Samus smiled as she rocked back on her knees. That was funny. Or maybe it wasn't, emotional reactions tended to get crossed past certain levels of stimulus and Samus had crossed that metaphorical threshold at planetary escape velocity. It was all she could do to slowly twist her neck back to glance over her shoulder.

The thing that now poked its way through the partially open vault door stood lightly on four thick legs like insectile spears. In fact, this creature hardly seemed to need them, buoyed instead by an invisible force it seemed more used to using. Thick dark green armor plating covered the upper half of its irregular round body and a crown of fangs jutted from the front beside four-packs of primitive eyes like dice pips, but the undercarriage was still clearly and depressingly familiar. A semi-transparent dome with red globular clusters suspended inside.

The Aurora's loosed metroids had been given time for metamorphosis and they now had heard the call of their progenitor. They had heard and they had come.

Samus sat kneeling in a pool of black sludge and her own blood, down by half an arm, half her weapons, and about half of the components required to run a human body. The third-form metroid's legs clicked as it stepped across the stone, each step growing closer to Samus' seated armored back. There wouldn't be another fight, Samus knew that. Not a real one. It was too strong and she was too weak. However, she also knew her nature. She closed her eyes and raised her weapon. At the edge of that last blink she saw but failed to process a bit of text that flashed into her visor.

" _Now, see where the path has brought you_."

...


	20. One Note in the Song

Chapter 20

One Note in the Song

...

Even back within the embrace of her chozo battle suit, Samus' breath painfully rasped and bubbled through her chest. Her implanted medical systems might be doing a surprisingly good job at keeping her alive and conscious but there was still a large amount of blood in her punctured right lung and more on the floor around her. The health diagnostic display showed her entire body as a diagram of blinking red warning signs. An inaccurate diagram, since that humanoid figure displayed in the visor still had her left hand. Samus' lungs twitched again in an agonizing laugh. Ha! Delirium and blood loss had a way of making everything funny.

Then she dizzily remembered the new third-form metroid slowly advancing towards where Samus had collapsed to her knees amid the sludgey ruins of the prototype's dissolving corpse. This creature was twice Samus' size, armored with thick green plates across its back, and was probably not about to die if it took a single quick step. So it had a few advantages on Samus right now. The creature's spear-like legs clicked against the stone floor, each sound curiously askew from its actual position. Oh, one of Samus' ears was completely filled with blood. She tilted her head to drain it and the sounds returned to their correct triangulation. However, Samus didn't have time to notice because that little motion set the world spinning so fast her sense of self blurred at the edges.

The suit was currently the only thing keeping Samus upright and it was not in much better shape than its operator. Emergency release procedures during a limitless overclock session broke as many operating guidelines as it had broken suit components. A technical schematic would look like an advanced metropolitan area after a major bombing campaign. Wisps of grey smoke trickled out between some of her armor plates which was all the more concerning since the suit did not actually contain any flammable components.

A growling, clicking noise echoed through the room and Samus realized her addled brain had forgotten the approaching metroid yet again. It, however, had not forgotten her and still made its way closer, though it seemed strangely hesitant for an omnivorous alpha predator that could equally eat organisms and heavy weapons fire. To molt twice in such a short time, this creature had feasted on a legion of life already. Suit telemetry said it had run at top speed through the vault tunnels but now that it was here each step forward wavered and stuttered like a chameleon. The hesitance was almost comical. Samus would have rolled her eyes if she didn't think that little motion would make her pass out.

The looming metroid advanced, twisting its half-formed head from side to side, the crown of fangs it had for a mouth flexing in and out as if tasting the air. It did not seem wary at the sight of Samus or her gun barrel, so it had been from the first batch of releases, not the ones who had chased Samus out of Aurora's underground chamber. It had not learned to fear her. Samus prepared for the lunge, but then the metroid crouched down, angling its vicious flexing maw towards something on the ground. It probably sensed some kinship in the scattered ruined corpse of its dead progenitor. The Last had expected her control programing to be inherited. And it had, a juvenile had refused to feed on her.

Samus stood up and was instantly surprised that she had managed to do so. She knew she was tough, but she also knew what the First Metroid had done to her, those blades biting deep into her sides, her legs, nearly through the one arm that remained functional. She would be surprised if sixty percent of her long strand muscle fibers were still intact after that. But though the suit was assisting each movement, astonishingly Samus actually seemed to be standing mostly under her own strength. That was strange. One of her many rounds of augmentations had done her more than she thought, or her insane desperate attempt to absorb the First had actually done more than just confuse the monster. Or, more likely, one of the suit's broken parts was its diagnostic system and the suit was just assisting more than the display said.

As soon as Samus moved, the metroid snapped its focus back onto her and let out a low crackling growl like rasping metal and electric sparks. It crouched down on its four long bladed legs and prepared to pounce, armored plates across its back vibrating with tensed energy, but now Samus could see what it had been inspecting on the floor. The ground here was littered with oozing black chunks of the First's disintegrating body, but that one particular dark trickle had a reddish cast. It was Samus own blood that drew this metroid.

Her visor blinked its proximity reminder at the same instant Samus heard a new sound from the vault door. The crouching metroid spun back and shrieked as another just like it pushed forward into the chamber, rearing in surprise as it blared its own crackling challenge at this newly discovered competitor. Oh yeah, multiple life signs approaching, that was right. The suit had shown that during the fight. Drowning in weariness, Samus mentally shrugged. This problem was really just one of accounting, right now a single of these metroids could kill her just as well as a hundred, and this display of their combative territorial instincts might actually open up a single hair's width of hope.

Hope, but only as long as the creatures remained balanced. Metroids could fall into uneasy coexistence as long as they were close to parity in strength, and these two were both third evolution. However, if a stronger member came along, or even just a third equal, then the cold war would instantly end as the lesser faction retreated or were devoured. The only exceptions were the pack's egg laying queen or, as Samus remembered, the Last Chozo herself. Feral metroids had shown her just as much deference as that first prototype had. Chains of genetic memory from the first to the last. And they smelled Samus' blood.

Samus' thoughts were too muddled for anything that could honestly be called a plan but today was a day for stupid long shots. By long drilled reflex, she reached her palm up to tap her helmet. The neck locks easily disengaged and the helmet came away, rocking as it magnetically stuck to her gauntlet palm, which was good since the movement reminded Samus' dazed brain she no longer had fingers inside that glove to grip with. She brought the helmet down against her armored thigh where it stuck with another magnetic clunk, safely holstering itself though she had no idea how she was going to get it locked back on her head without the use of her free hand. She was so tired but she still stood there, skin to air.

Both metroids froze in the middle of their combat posturing with a sudden shiver. Then they both turned her way, clusters of jellied red eyes glistening above nets of foot-long interlocking fangs. Samus stood before them, face exposed, her short blonde hair turned dark in places from blood. Unshielded life-forms were doomed near any metroid, armor was irrelevant and their hunger was uncontrollable. But the creatures did not lunge in a feeding frenzy. Instead they seemed to lift their half-formed mouths and bite at the air, sniffing or tasting.

Samus took a step and the metroids trembled, long legs clicking as they shifted back across the stone floor. Shifted away from her. Samus walked forward and both metroids parted to let her past. She reached the ajar vault door and glanced back out of the corner of her bloodshot eye. One of the metroids had taken a few steps deeper into the vault and crouched down to inspect the black sludge and shattered core of the First. Then the metroid turned and reached out one bladed leg to poke at something else in the ruin. Samus didn't have to guess to know it was her severed forearm, but she also knew she was not about to fight over it. Let the metroid have its toy, it wasn't doing Samus any good right now. Ha, that was a good joke. Ha, blood loss.

She trudged out through the dark tunnels that led to the vault, past other shadowed chambers holding other ancient horrors. Nothing followed. As she stumbled along some corner of her brain mentally recited a list of planets where she could get her arm regrown without waking up in a jail. The fact that she had no way to reach any of those places did not really touch her exhausted mind, but for some reason she did latch onto the memory that she didn't have an insurance provider. At the moment that was really funny and so with a sick smile on her pale bloody lips she lifted her foot onto the first step of the long staircase up to the main Temple levels. That endless stair stretched into the black above her.

Each slow weary step up thudded through Samus' body like mortar fire, blurring together so that each footfall could have been the ten thousandth or the first. But still she climbed because she could not allow herself to do anything else, pushing past the broken rubble of her first tumbling entry to the stairwell, past the cavernous Library of the Winnowers. Then her eyelids glacially blinked and when they opened she had arrived at the top of the stair, into a huge room dyed blue by dim light from tall crystal pillars carved in hard vertical lines. For a moment she wavered there, standing in the center of the floor and unable to remember what she was supposed to do. Then she remembered. She still had a mission.

The Last was hunting for the Chozo ascension technology. Could not let that happen. Hunting. Meant the Last did not know where. Technology created after her imprisonment, only deduced in existence. The Last thought of this place as home, trusted those memories for emotional reasons. Would not think to ask for directions in own house. In the temple for much longer than Samus but still had not found. Not anywhere the Last was familiar with then. New construction. What parts were built after the Last's imprisonment?

Samus' voice was horse and dry in the still air. "Map room. Where."

The suit heard and responded. With the helmet hanging off her hip, it could not show her the plotted course, but haptic feedback along her body nudged her along, directing Samus towards certain doorways by gentle pressure against her skin. Samus staggered on like a leaf on a stream, flowing with the current and behind her died the echoes of her footsteps in empty halls. She had a mission. It needed to be done. So she would do it.

Down at her hip, the inside of the helmet flashed lights to alert and occasionally hazarded a soft beep to grab her attention. It wanted to be worn. It wanted to tell her something. A frown touched Samus' brow. No, the suit did not want things. Something living inside it could want. But Samus was not going to bother to comply. She had already let it loose.

She spoke aloud under the dim temple lights, "Go ahead. You can figure out a way around that."

"You distrust intrusions." The masculine voice instantly appeared in her ears, clear and soft. Adam. No, not Adam. Samus had enough cybernetic enhancements that the ghost in the suit had no difficulty creating sound into her bones or eardrums. Or perhaps it bypassed true hearing entirely with direct nerve contact. And it denied intrusion.

Samus didn't bother responding to that irony. Her footsteps still plodded along through dust and dark, her stride baring a wobbling feeling like she was walking on stilts. Everything below her knees felt distant and numb. She also wasn't going to call that thing Adam. In her time she had known two friends named Adam. He died, and then the echo was dead too, slain in combat amid the stars. She might be able to get him back at some point but this thing just a stolen voice. Until it had something useful to say it could burn along with all the other ghosts.

Set in a thick stone wall, tall metal doors clicked and scraped as they slid apart in overlapping triangles, sandy grit grinding away uselessly in the immeasurable seams. Samus stepped through without breaking stride. The temple was accepting her now, the way opening effortlessly where before she had hacked and punched and screamed her way through each barrier. Now her way was unbarred. That meant something, and in the distant tired corners of her mind Samus felt a familiar anger.

She was broken and bled, severed and stretched, but she had known all these sensations before. Many times. And now this pile of stone and circuitry thought to judge her worthy? It thought she had proved herself? It dared to doubt her?

Samus' staggered on. She had a mission.

Then, finally, she entered a square chamber filled with machines and dust. Chozo metal structures and dim orange lights lay under a tangled root system of human technology, creeper vines of white plastic and tiny blue bulbs. As Samus stepped into the room, the Chozo lights pulsed, flowing up sharp metal trunks as the abandoned device at the that filled the room stirred from slumber. A second later the various human sensors and computers spun up to active states with an imagined sigh of relief, their scientists had being clawing at this door for years. Then, in the air at the center of the room, a web of glowing chambers and hallways bloomed into existence, the entire temple hanging suspended in space. It was a full holographic map from the vaults to the energy absorption spire, from the great entrance door to the far distant great Chozo statue that loomed out of the mountain slopes high above. In the air all around the map, tiny chozo gyphs twinkled in a constantly shifting flurry of ephemeral light.

Only one part of the flurry was constant. A single stable point with a single simple written message.

" _You are here._ "

Then a voice once more chimed into the air and Samus was surprised to hear it was female this time. The bio-computer Aurora spoke out a weak and tinny device, one of the human devices scattered somewhere among the technology in this chamber whose only virtue was that it possessed both a transceiver and a speaker.

"Samus Aran, it is good to have located you. I am happy to report that under my new orders I may once more provide you with full aid. Commander Nakamura had authorized you to receive any and all material assistance. All my information will be made available, without redaction. Urgent notice: the forces loyal to Space Pirate Ridley are preparing for a large scale military ground assault. Extensive weapons supplies are being offloaded from the ships and assembled in their landing valley without concern for secrecy. The target is unclear though with those numbers they could sweep through the temple or overwhelm my own defenses with equal speed."

The electric reverberation echoed off flat stone walls, dry and cheap in its sound. The message: you are still useful, all is forgiven. So familiar. Then a new sound broke through the emptiness so sharply it startled Samus. The sound was painful and harsh and jerked in a harsh rhythm. It was laughter and then Samus realized it was her. Useful. It was all too funny.

The ringing in her ears shuddered with each agonizing laugh until it almost formed a beat. Samus could hear it even when she closed her eyes. With pain and hacking coughs the laughing slowly subsided. Then for no reason she could find in herself she began to sing. She supposed it was only because she wanted to. No duty, no obligation, no right, no wrong.

It was a single rough breathy note, then a few more. The sound was soft and simple, no words only shifting tones. But the notes began to build and slowly transformed, rising and interleaving. Soon it grew to something no human could replicate, constant and unchanging on every note both inhaling and exhaling. It was a song. Not every pass through the Zebes augmentation tank had been for strength. One was just so a young girl could join in the chozo songs of memory and sunrise. She sat pressed back against Old Bird's folded legs.

Soon the empty temple halls filled with drifting sound and dead stone began to wake as it sang back in softly reflected echos. Each carved edge of decoration and engraved grabbed the sound and pushed it back, blurred and transformed by corners and lines, joining the whisper of comfort and of isolation. The song was not an important one. It was not a hymn of battle or discovery, it had no meaning. Samus was not even sure it was a real song. It was just a snatch of melody that she had made up as a child on Zebes, repeated aimlessly until even both Grey Voice and Old Bird hummed it on occasion. They had sung it when she left. Now it once more rose through Samus unbidden and she did not have the strength to resist it. It was just her, murmured out to the empty world.

And then the soft reflected echos transformed to a harmony. From down the long dark corridors, new notes began to join the song.

Aurora's voice suddenly returned in the map room, filled with computerized alarm as her words crackled and faded towards static snow. "Samus Aran, a new source of interference is disrupting communications. Multiple sites across in the temple are transmitting a..."

She faced away out of intelligibility and Samus was left only with the music and her song. Her breath was weak and painful, giving barely more than a whisper, but now the sound rose from her imagination to surround her. It came little by little, drifting down the hallways, as though a crowd spread over twenty miles joined in one by one. But still the music rose. It rose until it filled everything. Soon the long dead air trembled with loss and defiance and the stones trembled like the approach of distant armies, soaring and crashing, chorale melody above a bass as broad and firm as the earth. With her eyes closed and her body numb, Samus could only hear and what she heard was a planet joining its voice to hers.

...

Outside the temple a cold wind blew over the high volcanic plain of the lifeless slopes from the high mountains, like it had for millions of years before. Then that wind chanced to meet another crosswise stream until they twisted and both caught the edge of the deep canyon web below the towering seated Chozo. The wind blew past scattered basalt teeth that jutted over, the remnants of old lava tube roofs. Then, as the wind curled down into the canyons, it met its first stone statue. The statue was made of the living rock of the high canyon wall, carefully formed into the shape of a Chozo body. Here and there the statue was perforated with tubes, carved holes through the body so perfectly placed that that they were nearly invisible to the eye. But to the wind the holes reached out and caught a single breath to transform it into music.

The stone musician began to play and all along the dozen long canyons beside the Temple ten thousand other statues added their own notes to the song. The sound changed as the wind whipped and gusted but instead of random cacophony each note blended together in a perfect symphony. And they took up the beat. The complexity only increased with the volume until the land shook with an unending roar of triumph and heartrending sorrow. Wordless voices sweetly wailed over notes so deep they thrummed the sky. An impossible melody surged from those who had never lived, a stone carved song orchestrated precisely as any symphony.

Hunched under her nest of concrete, metal, and energy shields, the bio-computer Aurora 926 regarded her sensors with confusion. She had access to years of data on this planet, years of observation on the chozo temple and the area around it. The musical statues were well known but they were just stone, an artistic curiosity whistling and moaning dumbly as a breath of air passed by. They could not be programed to make a song, to play their notes in time. They could not be synchronized into a melody, made to follow a beat. There was no programing, there were no moving parts. It was impossible for them to form this song. And yet now they sang in thundering harmony. The Chozo were singing and at that sound even computers huddled in fear.

...

Deep in the temple, Samus opened her bloodshot blue eyes. She had stopped singing, but only because she was about to faint from lack of breath. At least, she thought she had stopped but with the helmet hanging from her hip the sound of music still filled her ears. In her dizzy imagination it stretched across the universe but as her consciousness swum back to reality she noticed it at least filled the the temple hallways.

Then the music slowly faded but a snort of bitter amusement still blew a few flecks of blood across Samus upper lip as she realized what had happened. They always did have a flair for the dramatic.

She didn't bother speaking with any real volume. The sound did not need to travel far. She was wearing the suit. "It's not intrusion if you were always there. Come on out then, and stop wearing the mask. You've had your signal."

Adam's voice filled her head, firm and warm. But behind it was something different, a mind familiar and alien. So very familiar. "Program recognized. The parameters are met. The moment is now. The Path has fallen into clarity, the variance chosen, and the way is set. What is seen has been seen and will come to pass."

Then there was a long moment of silence, with only the fading distant rumble of an endless choir.

The voice said, "Hatchling, we see you."

Samus found she had no need to breathe. She had been expecting this for a little while now, but still it shook her. She had once called the chozo battle suit she wore a Ship of Theseus, upgraded and patched and repaired and replaced until it was almost impossible to tell if anything original remained at all. It was Chozo, and Human, and Luminoth, and Byyronian, and Urtragian, and Metroid, and other things beside. It was all of them and none, but somewhere at the core under the scars and repairs was a single shining seed, the core that was always unchanged. Something set and etched from the beginning. From Zebes. Set by her parents, waiting for a voice to borrow and the time to use it. The sight of a planet, the scent of blood, and the sound of a song.

Samus smiled a smile that would never be seen, and whispered into the past. "I see you."

The voice was still strong and clear, but filled with a sadness that could crush through steel. "Two old fools, we mock ourselves claiming to see. We are so very blind. We do not know what way you traveled to be here. We do not know what you have suffered, what you have gained. We do not even know what words carry our message to you. For this brief moment you exist in shining certainty but even after all our vaunted prophecy, the future is as constellations, dim points of light in impenetrable darkness. For this and endless things besides, forgive us. Forgive us, our stolen child. Our only child."

The dark void of the temple stretched out for miles in each direction, but now, almost imperceptibly, it trembled at something vast slowly shifting. Some distant machinery awakened.

"Across years and the void of oblivion we weep, and yet still we left you and for that we deserve no forgiveness. Now you come through pain and struggle to here, the end of our trail, and hope for guidance. We have none. You hope for aid. What little we can has already been placed for you. You hope for us to give you something, any sight of this vaunted Path we have clearly worked towards, a single star to guide your way. Spit on our bones for in our greatest failure we cannot. Trapped on our own cowardly path, all we can do is say the things you need to hear so that there might yet be a chance. So that our purgation might begin."

The glowing holographic map still hung in the air before Samus, but now the snow of glyphs coalesced on one section in the temple's upper reaches, far away. The Great Statue. The towering mountain statue itself was filled with passages and machines, the most recent in the entire complex. That was the destination. That was the goal.

The voice was now almost a whisper. "You are strong. Stronger than anyone can believe. And you are loved. More than we ever knew how to say. You are Samus Aran and after all our lifetimes, our triumphs, our empire and our penance, all we can do is ease your way."

Then it fell into silence. But the silence no longer felt empty.

Slowly the snow of virtual glyphs around the map hologram intensified, coalescing unfathomable information not just around the high and distant facility behind the Statue but around every hallway and chamber, describing access to every system and secret. But in the center of it all something became clear by absence. A void, a spot of darkness amid the light that drew the eye. And it was nearby.

Samus turned and walked away from the map room, still staggered and hobbled but this time she needed no gentle pressure to guide her through the chambers. Then, too long and too soon, she arrived in a cavernous cathedral space, greeting her on three sides with carvings of dark stone, statues and pillars and flying buttresses in baroque perfusion. In every direction but one, lithe stone Chozo danced and grasped, carved flowers bloomed in rock as thin as paper, forming a confused and tumultuous riot that filled every inch, nearly obscene in crafting before the contrast with the fourth side of this room.

A featureless wall of pale stone rose before her, stretching left right and up into the shadows of infinity. Its size shrank Samus down to a pinprick before it, a glaringly insurmountable barrier holding up the weight of mountains above. It was obviously a secret door. The Chozo loved decoration, carvings, and murals so to imagine that they might spare this vast canvas for anything as petty as structural reasons was ridiculous. But when a secret entrance was this obvious, it meant it was a trap. Every time.

Samus breathed out. Scan said nothing, but then again anyone could scan. The Last, in her hurried search, could scan. Samus stepped forward to meet the base of this towering wall. She slowly exhaled and pressed the barrel of her weapon against the pale stone grit with a clunk. She just hoped the hidden lock was not expecting a handprint.

At first there was nothing, but then that point of contact was outlined by a circle of pale blue light as stone suddenly began to shine, flicking into life without any transition between the states. Then reality blinked again and fine glowing lines appeared on the stone around it, radiating spokes of angular filigree, full of curves and points covering a space wider than Samus was tall. Then another blink and another swath of wall was consumed, filled with glowing lines and glyphs like alchemy and circuitry. And so it continued, chunk by chunk, faster and faster, though beyond the third ring Samus could make out nothing from her perspective other than a reduction in the gloom. The pale wall was a hundred feet tall, two hundred wide, and now every inch was filled with a web of intricate light.

Then the faintest breath of air brushed against Samus' bare face. Wind inside the temple. The wall glowed but was unchanged, with no opening, and the reciprocal pressure from the gun barrel gave no hit of motion. But the air had moved. So with a weary sigh Samus lowered her weapon and stepped forward as if to knock into the wall face first. She passed through the solid stone like a shaft of light through shadow.

First there was darkness and then there was light. Sight returned and Samus now stood on a perfectly flat floor lit in a glow of soft orange light that washed out in a circle barely a fifty feet across until it faded into an endless dark in every direction. Samus turned back to see the pale stone wall and any sign of her entrance were gone. She stood alone on an infinite plane, in the light of a single candle flame.

Yes, that was about what she had expected. Now all she had to do was wait for the tra...

A crash of sound filled the void, the rigid stone floor vibrating like a speaker beneath her feet.

The language was Chozo and the accent was Loud. A deafening voice roared, " _ASPIRANT_ , _PROVE YOURSELF_."

A tremendous _Whmmp!_ filled the room and Samus staggered backwards, pushed by a blast of displaced air. The chamber void was no longer empty. Before her rose a burning giant, a colossal figure of flame and shadow and yellowed chozo bone standing before an endless wall of blinding fire. A glyph-etched sword was in its hand and the giant glared down with golden points of light from inside dark eyesockets. Then the wall of fire behind the giant flexed and closed before stretching out again. No, not a wall but wings, burning wings of endless flame worn by a giant made of bone.

The giant guardian slowly swung the titanic sword with the sound of a storm building at its passage, and a point larger than Samus' entire body came to rest before her, aimed down at her heart. A terrible radiating heat beat against her cheeks, drying her lips and her eyes and the blood trails on her skin in its fury.

Samus wavered in place, half dead muscles fumbling to keep her standing as damaged lungs spasmed to inflate. Each second was pain and yet the point of the massive sword sill tracked every tremble and sway. By drilled in combat reflex she reached towards her helmet at her hip, but the gauntlet bumped against it and the fingers trailed uselessly, a reminder of her missing forearm. Funnily, that hand was the only part of her that did not hurt, though the missing wrist still screamed its distress in confused nerves.

She looked up at the final guardian and met its empty golden eyes. The giant waited in dispassionate judgement.

"Fuck you, I've proved myself enough."

Samus stepped forward and the giant drew back its sword to swing, to begin and end her challenge in a single bloody second. Samus' footsteps against the stone were drowned by the roar of burning wings and endless fire but in her current state she could not dodge, she could not fight, she could only hope her tired, weakened brain had guessed the test. Then the massive sword crashed down against her head.

Samus opened her eyes to golden light. The giant was gone, as was the infinite black void, new illumination shrinking the space down to simply a very large rectangular room. And at the end of it was a small metal door covered in a faint glowing energy shield. As Samus approached, the shield vanished and the layers of decorative metal on the door smoothly slid apart like layers of feathers to reveal a passage beyond.

Blocks of pale sandy stone made the walls, gridded with concentric squares of inset metal lines. Past the entry passage, the space opened up and the floor rose up in wide shallow steps of the same stone, under-lit and capped with dark metal. The camber spread as it rose, step by step, until a central plinth against the the far wall stood alone, with sheer expanses above it and to each side. But those expanses of wall were not empty, they were covered in writing carved so deep in the rock their shadow stained the glyphs as black as ink. Nor was the central plinth empty. A throne sat on that heavy square platform and on that throne sat a suit of shining metal.

It was a chozo battle suit, but of a sort Samus had never seen before. Compared to the suits she or the Last wore now this was a masterwork to lumps of clay. They were shadows and this was the truth painted in copper and gold. Unmoving on its throne, the true suit stared down at Samus' approach, every inch of the armor plates sculpted in organic shapes was etched with intricate designs. The line-work was so dense and detailed it tricked the eye, creating the impression of softness even as it shone with a metallic gleam stronger than the hardest steel. The suit gave forth its own light to reflect for from behind those swooping, upswept shoulder pauldrons, some compromise between the Power and Varia suits, ephemeral thin bands of manifested light shone out like the memory of heavenly feathers. The helmet bore the smooth hint of points and ridges behind it, flowing down to below the visor if creating the slightest suggestion of a beak. The weapon that surrounded the right forearm was composed of sinuous lines, deadly metal waves condensing down like spikes until they united at the barrel to form a thing that was the terror of nightmares and the dream of salvation. The suit was the greatest weapon the Chozo had ever created, masterwork of centuries, beyond every ambition of its long conquering empire.

It was sized and shaped for a human woman.

Above it on the walls some long gone Chozo spoke through stone words:

 _Know your weakness._

 _The mountain stands before you, waiting with cruel indifference._

 _The sea stands before you, flexing with endless strength._

 _The storm stands before your, raging across the sky._

 _The planet stands before you, melting a heart of fire._

 _The stars, the galaxies, the clusters, and all infinity stand before you, stretching from the first to the last of time; more foes, more might, more terrible power than any mortal mind can compass._

 _Before those enemies you are nothing._

 _Before those enemies you cannot win._

 _But with this, you can fight._

Samus smiled as she stepped forward. As she walked her battle suit unfolded around her, releasing her inch by inch, almost breathing out as those unfolded sheaths then shimmered and dissolved into light behind her. Motes like shining stars flowed past over Samus' shoulders, sweeping ahead towards the throne while bloody footprints marked the pale stone where she passed. She staggered and shuffled, each low step an endless struggle that tore open wounds and let more red streams trickle down her sides. The stump of her left arm hung stiff at her side, but on her lips was a smile and still she rose, step by step. Her sight blurred as the figure on the throne shifted and expanded, unfolding and opening.

Then she sat on the throne and then she was whole.

...


End file.
